If all goes well, we will be boarding a plane for Los Angeles tonight to meet with a duo of guitar awesomeness! Read More
The Cracking the Code Mike Stern interview is here! In this intimate chat, the genial jazz master shares a wealth of improvisational insights, delivered in an extemporaneous fashion as effortless his playing. Read More
As we guitarists are so often caught up in the technique rat race, it’s important to remind ourselves once in a while that so much of the personal style of the players we admire is actually a function of limitations. Let Mike Stern explain: Read More
Molly Tuttle’s prodigious songwriting chops, ethereal voice, and physical command of the guitar make her one of the most exciting new players in bluegrass. She’s the International Bluegrass Music Association’s Guitar Player of the Year for 2017. And she is the subject of the latest Masters in Mechanics interview here at Cracking the Code. Read More
As an example of what we have to do to get a great sound mix in our interviews, take a look at the above screenshot. We’re editing an interview I did with Martin Miller on improvision. He’s on guitar, I’m on keys. All in the same room. I’m going through the whole thing manually as I edit, clamping down his mic to only when he talks and only when I talk. I can’t use automatic ducking like we do during live broadcasts like the Batio thing, because he sometimes talks and plays at the same time, and so do I. Read More
Three 4K cameras, a video-enabled smartphone, three microphones, one guitar, one blaring amplifier, and one blazing shred legend streaming a television-quality video and audio broadcast to a 70,000-person internet audience through a single turbocharged iMac? Sure, no problem. Would you like fries with that? Read More
We just finished editing the David Grier interview for our Masters in Mechanics subscribers! Meeting David was a wonderful step forward in our quest to get a better understanding of crosspicking techniques in general, and bluegrass picking technique in particular. Read More
It's one of the most fundamental and personal gear choices of all: the pick you use. And we want to know what the most popular of those choices really are.…
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Steve Morse’s almost mythical musical capabilities need no introduction. Marrying blazing chops to a singular sense of hook writing creativity, his distinctive brand of rootsy American virtuosity has inspired generations of players to think outside of the pentatonic box. Read More
What if you could take Yngwie’s mastery of sequenced ideas and apply it to Eric’s signature pentatonics using downward pickslanting? Well, now you can!
Yngwie’s mastery of sweeping and Eric’s alternate picking approach give us two great solutions to ascending pentatonic fours!
We recently gave Cracking the Code viewers a cool homework assignment: find a way to play ascending fours, against the pentatonic scale, using the Yngwie Malmsteen and Eric Johnson downward pickslanting system. It seems simple enough, but it’s something we don’t see very often on guitar, and for good reason — the picking and fingering can both pose challenges.
With a basic understanding of downward pickslanting mechanics, though, we can design a couple of really nice solutions to this problem that pay fantastic creative dividends.
In this lesson, we explore solutions to the daunting challenge of pentatonic fours — utilizing the DWPS system that you already know — that will help unleash your creativity with pentatonic, whole tone, and diminished sequence ideas.
Check out the complete lesson — including tablature — on Guitar World!
To grab the slow-mo video and tabs, just sign up for our mailing list and we’ll send you a free download!