Did you know there are different kinds of pickstrokes? These pickstroke types have different capabilities, and profound implications for what you can and cannot play with them. As with anything mechanical, you have to use the right tool for the job. Read More
Remember when Billy Joel said the piano sounds like a carnival? That’s what it’s like being in the room with Olli Soikkeli and Cesar Garabini when they get their irrepressible energy flowing: Read More
Teemu is in town — wrapping up Wintersun’s Fall 2018 North American tour this Sunday at Irving Plaza in NYC (tickets here if you’re in the area!)
And on Monday, we’re hosting him at the Cracking the Code Studio for a live workshop and Q&A session.
Teemu is the lead guitarist of Finnish power metal band Wintersun. He’s well versed in weaving punishing rhythms and intricate dual-lead flights of fantasy into epic power metal soundscapes.
Our interview with Teemu is one of our most watched ever, and for good reason — Teemu is a rare combination of ferocious player and masterful teacher. Specifically, he’s watched a lot of our stuff, and has extensive experience teaching pickslanting mechanics to guitarists of all levels.
Here’s a good clip of his scary arpeggio playing:
We’re excited to catch up with Teemu and talk technique, teaching, and more. And we look forward to taking some viewer questions!
The event is free for everyone to watch, and will be live on YouTube.
If you have an account on the Cracking the Code Platform, you can tune in via our Live Studio and submit questions for Teemu once the event starts.
We’ll get an edited version uploaded to the site later, with clips and tablature for Masters in Mechanics members.
Tune in to watch the event live: Monday, Oct. 15th at 4pm ET / 8pm UTC
We’ve traditionally been taught that instrument technique practice is about repeating things correctly until the movements sink in. But it’s hard to do that when you don’t know how to do the movement correctly in the first place. That’s never more true than with crosspicking technique. Read More
The amazing Olli Soikkeli fuses Gypsy picking with his own formidable pure alternate approach. And within that pure alternate approach he blends several different movements including pickslanting, and a blazing crosspicking motion he uses for the kind of torturous phrases that most of use grew up avoiding: Read More
Mark your calendar! We’ll be on air with Mika tomorrow afternoon, talking music and technique and answering viewer questions live.
It’s a free broadcast, and we’ll be streaming to YouTube — but to submit questions, you’ll need to log in to the Cracking the Code Platform and head to our Live Studio. Read More
We thought you’d enjoy some Frank Gambale this weekend! We’re still working on tablature for the 100+ examples we’ve pulled out of the conversation, and we should have that by the middle of next week or so. But the interview itself is ready to roll on the Cracking the Code platform, so we figured we’d turn it on for those who’d like to get a look at it now. You can find it right here: Read More
You may have heard the term two-way pickslanting in discussions of picking mechanics, particularly when it comes to scale playing. It may even be what brought you to Cracking the Code in the first place. Indeed, the discovery that elite players actually make changes to their picking motion on the fly, right in the middle of a phrase, was groundbreaking. It explained a lot about why exercises like scales are considered fundamental, and yet paradoxically, only the best of the best players seem to be any good at alternate picking them. Read More
It’s time to enjoy the spellbinding sounds of an amazing musician who also happens to be an internet pioneer.
Mika Tyyskä is the creator of the Guitar Shred Show, an ingeniously inventive Flash animation that took the incipient guitar internet by storm over ten years ago. In the Shred Show, intrepid Web 2.0 surfers could use their keyboards to control a shredding avatar named Mr. Fastfinger. Armed with a battery of ’80s-inspired licks, the sensei-like Fastfinger waged musical warfare against an accordion playing demon who had possessed a horde of finger-tapping dwarves. The concept was clearly insane. Read More
