Troy Grady

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.

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.

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.

The Rusty Cooley Collection is a painstakingly remastered release of three classic meetings featuring hours of new footage and hundreds of musical examples. This massive new release offers a close-up look at one of the most fascinating techniques we’ve filmed. It’s also a document of the history of musical technique investigation itself.

Wrist technique is notoriously complicated. We’ve spent years filming experts, and working with great players in Technique Critique, to understand the various ways it is accomplished. What we’ve learned is that you can cover a lot of ground with two essential styles: USX and DBX. And now we’ve updated the Pickslanting Primer with an awesome set of four new lessons featuring our latest tips for learning these two powerful picking styles.

Brandon is one of the most exciting players in modern metal. As lead guitarist and key songwriter for the band The Black Dahlia Murder, he mixes a decidedly retro appreciation for the classics (and neo-classics!) with an adventurous sense of harmony that borrows inventively from classical music and jazz.

The Magnet is Cracking the Code’s purpose-designed mount for filming your technique with your phone. It’s finally here in limited quantities in our store, but you probably shouldn’t buy one. Well, ok — at least not until you know if it’s going to help!

At 90,000 views and counting, our lesson on unlocking wrist motion picking speed using “reverse dart” technique has been up for a couple weeks and the response has been amazing. This is gratifying because it took years of work to research, test, and learn how to teach the concepts it contains. If you haven’t seen it yet, here it is on our YouTube channel:

I don’t have special genetics for fast picking. I was never unusually good at video games or sports requiring elite hand-eye coordination. And I couldn’t play at these tempos until I figured out the concepts and techniques you’ll learn in this lesson. In fact, my primary skill is being NOT GOOD at stuff, but realizing there’s usually a trick to it that can be figured out with critical thinking and enough trial and error.