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.

Cracking The Code seminars take a leap forward with Metronomic Rock, a new instructional series hosted by the amazing Tommaso “Tommo” Tufarelli on the Cracking the Code team. Metronomic Rock is an homage to a time when hair was big, string skips were bigger, and guitar heroes subdivided the beat with metronomic precision!  In this first installment of the series, Tommo pulls back the curtain on one of the most popular escape motions of all time:  DSX Motion.

It’s easy to assume that your playing is sloppy, slow, or fatiguing because you haven’t put in enough practice time. But what if the real reason is that you’re simply doing it wrong? How can you tell the difference?

In our latest update to the Pickslanting Primer, “Choosing A Technique”, we address the critical issue of evaluating the performance of the technique you’re currently using — or the one you’re trying to learn. This update arrives alongside a large batch of additional lessons and usability improvements that we’ve been rolling out in pieces over the last several months.

One of the biggest obstacles to achieving efficient picking motion is not even the motion itself: it’s the pick attack.

Cracking The Code players, we’ve rolled out an awesome update to our picking motion tutorials! Wrist technique is maybe the single most common picking motion in use across all plectrum instruments. But it is also one of the most complicated and misunderstood.