Troy Grady

Feb 04 2014

Hail, the Cab: Building a Custom 2x12 Cabinet

By Troy Grady Features 6 Comments

Cracking the Code Impulse Response Pack

Record the speaker cabinet sounds of Cracking the Code with the Cracking the Code IR Pack!

Includes all the pine cabinet H30 impulses — plus the Marshall 1960A impulses we use for rhythm tracks, and a couple ultra-rare Cornford 2×12 impulses featuring the Vintage 30 speaker recorded via the Shure SM57.

UPDATE: We don’t currently have the impulse response pack for sale, but will try to get it added to our new store soon.

Amid the seemingly illimitable interest in amplifiers, with their mysterious tone crafting abilities, and their steam-punk innards so attractively aglow with filaments and glass, it’s easy to overlook the humble wooden box at the end of the chain. But if your 10-second Chevelle is only as fast as the slicks that hook it to the tarmac, then your supercharged big block of an amp only sounds as good as the device actually emitting those pressure waves into the room: the speaker cabinet.

Indeed, the speaker and cabinet assembly is a good part of any classic tone. That sparkle on the first Van Halen album? Reportedly the work of the glittery JBL D-120 speaker. But with a nearly endless variety of speaker cabinets available in all shapes, sizes, and power handling capabilities, why build your own? As is often the case in the world of extreme guitar sports, the answer is simple: because we can.
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Jan 22 2014

Steve Always Wins: The Crossroads Intimidation Breakdown

By Troy Grady codenews, Lessons 48 Comments

In 1986, Steve Vai was having one of those years. March saw the debut of the film Crossroads, for which Steve wrote and performed both the rock and neoclassical sequences of the now-famous guitar duel, and in which he also landed a starring role as the devil’s swaggering henchman, Jack Butler. Trailer clips of the film’s climactic musical showdown, with its mesmerizing cascade of diminished arpeggios, had just begun to explode adolescent minds across the country when David Lee Roth stepped into the studio with Steve to record his highly anticipated post-Van Halen grudge album.

Dec 24 2013

Lesson: Inside Eddie's Arcade

By Troy Grady codenews, Lessons 5 Comments

The Cutting Room Floor

Not all great ideas make the final cut, and the overly ambitious scene “Eddie’s Arcade”, from Season 1, Episode 1 of Cracking the Code, is a great example of that. An over-the-top homage to Tron Legacy and Back to the Future, it was a tour de force of cinematic animation whose demands on my personal time were ultimately at odds with the exigency of actually getting things finished.

Nov 02 2013

Cracking the Code is Back! (What Took You So Long?)

By Troy Grady codenews, News 32 Comments

One Thing Leads to Another

50 SHADES OF GRADY: Why do we guitarists inflict the pain of practice upon ourselves?

Did you ever get out to the parking lot, realize you forgot the milk and the eggs, and have to go all the way back inside? It’s just like that time you had that killer idea to film those guitar players in slow motion, and print it up on a DVD. But then you realized you left out the truckload of technical research necessary to understand it all, and, on top of that, the historical backstory explaining why anyone even cares about this stuff in the first place. Totally — happens all the time!

And so it is that a simple idea born in the era of spinning optical discs grew into the most detailed investigation of picking technique ever put to internet video: Cracking the Code, the series.

Across three seasons, and more than five hours of in-depth historical and mechanical analysis — and, for that matter, five hours of plain old fun — the puzzle of plectrum dominance is expounded, unraveled, and finally mastered.

Oct 22 2013

A Long Time Ago, In A Galaxy Far, Far Away

By Troy Grady News 7 Comments

Once upon a few billion years past, a chance lightning strike on the roiling seas of an empty world synthesized the tiny germ of an idea: a plot to unravel the secrets of guitar pick mechanics. From that moment, a mad accretive genesis ensued, piling idea upon idea, giving rise to the florid tangles of jungles, the heaving throngs of cities, the sandy spires of the pyramids, the…

…er, the sound of my alarm going off? (Queue the iPhone “Marimba” jingle.)
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Jul 01 2007

A Little Bit Country

By Troy Grady News One Comment

Anyone who thinks filming an indie documentary means sitting around coffeehouses in Greenpoint with your MacBook and a copy of Final Cut Pro has clearly never attempted to track down virtuoso guitarists in their natural habitats. While my sleep deficit suffered this month, my appreciation for American music, and my growing collection of frequent flyer miles, are the better for it. It’s fitting that filming the three country players in this month’s Code update also required me to see a lot more of it. The country, that is. So straighten your seat backs and return your tray tables to their upright position, we’re coming in for some hot country picking. Read More

Apr 12 2007

Frankly Speaking

By Troy Grady News One Comment

It’s a good thing I don’t work in Apple’s marketing department, because I really can’t keep a secret.

I silently posted two updates to the Cracking the Code players page over the past month or so, and now that global media distribution has become as easy as falling down stairs, it didn’t take long for word to get out. And with stiff competition for pop cultural bandwidth from Anna, Sanjaya, and Don, I consider this a victory for guitarists everywhere. Read More

Apr 10 2007

Amp Shopping

By Troy Grady Features 5 Comments

A guitar player with no amp? What’s next, a graphic designer with no Macintosh? A writer with no latte? Alas, it’s true. With the highly focused and forensic nature of the work on the Cracking the Code film project, there’s been no need for me to own anything that produces actual amplified sound. For the last several years, my musical activities have targeted the mechanical over the creative, and the visual over the aural. Sure, I’ve produced lessons, but those have generally been recorded direct-to-Powerbook, using one of my trusty Tech 21 NYC Tri-OD or GT2 pedals, or the amp emulation built into Apple’s excellent and underrated GarageBand. Otherwise, there has been no writing of song nor playing of gig. Walking past my house, there would be no evidence to suggest it was anything other than the abode of another sonically unobtrusive yuppie. Read More

Oct 09 2006

Shawn Lane: So What?

By Troy Grady Lessons 8 Comments

Centrifugal Funk was supposed to be just another one of those guitar compilations. Released by shred pornographer Mark Varney in 1991, it featured a trio of hired guns laying down silicone-enhanced solos over processed covers of trad jazz tunes. This was the era of Nirvana and Pantera, and the infomercially polished karaoke numbers on the disc were already dead on arrival. But the formidable talents of the help bordered on necromancy. Read More

Jan 22 2006

Albert Lee: Fun Ranch Boogie

By Troy Grady Lessons 2 Comments

If you’ve ever been humbled by the effortless speed and harmonic fluency of our string-slinging siblings south of the Mason-Dixon line, you’re in good company. So universal is the admiration among shred masters for their flatpickin’ and fingerpickin’ brethren that country-inflected radio rock tunes like Van Halen’s Finish What Ya Started comfortably share iPod space with the striking industrial-country fusion of players like John 5. Then there are the bona-fide switch hitters like Eric Johnson and Steve Morse, whose dual citizenship in roots and rock essentially moot the question. Suffice it to say that a healthy fear of country skillz is an integral part of the shred psyche. Read More