Cracking the Code creator!
If you have watched any Cracking the Code, you have no doubt heard about pickslanting. But “slanting the pick” only works when the picking motion matches the pickslant. It is absolutely possible to do one and not the other, and this is where things go wrong.
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Our latest YouTube feature is a deep dive into the surprisingly terrifying shred technique of a younger Joe Pass. It’s a collaboration with peerless transcriber and guitar educator Levi Clay, who supplied the musical and historical erudition, while Cracking The Code handled the plectrum plumbing. It’s a mammoth 40-minute investigation that is one part documentary and one part instructional video.
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Here’s the bad news: The individual lesson chapters in our awesome Synchronicity seminar contain zero pranks and ASMR. How is that going to work on YouTube?
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Do you have trouble synchronizing your hands? Is your picking slower than your fretting? Is your fretting slower than your picking? At Cracking The Code we hear these complaints daily. And our response is the same each time: How do you know? Without a rigorous plan for testing and streamlining both hands, it’s impossible to know why your playing sounds uncoordinated, or how to fix it. Until now.
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Our latest lesson tackles an incorrect assumption at the core of one of the most commonly repeated pieces of musical practice advice of all time: Go slow and get all the notes right. How could this possibly be bad advice?
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With the release of our frighteningly good interview with horror-metal master Miles Dimitri Baker, we’re taking a slasher’s blade to prices across our entire metal collection – our biggest sale event since Black Friday. From now until Next Friday the 27th, our store has killer sales on all our Metal products.
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Purveyor of fine horror-metal riffage and all-around amazing player Miles Dimitri Baker joins us for a deep dive on technique, tone, and the uncanny mechanics that make his guitar playing both terrifyingly tight and endlessly fascinating.
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The amazing Dweezil Zappa was in town recently and invited me to play a tune with his band at New York’s Town Hall. This is a historic venue beloved by NYC music fans. And of course Dweezil is the best. So this was a pretty cool and slightly terrifying invite. There was a non-zero chance this would all go sideways once I was up there.
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New to blast beats, chugs, and gutturals? These new lessons are for you. Today we’re updating the amazing Obsidian seminar with four new lessons designed to make these extreme styles even more approachable.
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Let’s talk about improvisation. Better yet, let’s question what it is. How much of your extemporaneous playing is truly improvised, and not simply memorized? This is a central theme in our brand new interview with fearless improviser and insightful teacher Roy Ziv.
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