As every guitarist knows, a thousand repetitions doesn’t always guarantee results. How much do we really know about musical practice?
Get ready for an unguarded conversation with one of metal’s most inimitable lead guitar voices: Marty Friedman.
While we don’t like to count our chickens before they hatch, we’ve been doing a lot of work lining up new Masters in Mechanics material, and thought it would be remiss not to share what’s cooking. Here’s a peek at our upcoming interview schedule: Read More
New Video: Guitar Anatomy
We’ve just updated the Cracking the Code Season Pass with a new video — a feature called “Guitar Anatomy: The Four Fundamental Movements”. Read More
In this intimate chat with the amazing Jimmy Bruno, we explore the intricate two-way pickslanting and two-way sweeping mechanics that power his masterful bop excursions.
In the conversation, Jimmy dives into his seemingly endless reservoir of creativity and produces a veritable rainbow of harmonic ideas: dominant, diminished, augmented, altered, suspended and more. Download includes the one-hour conversation and over 60 slow-motion clips with tablature.
Our latest Masters in Mechanics release features over two hours of incredible investigation:
- One-hour in-depth interview
- Addition hour-long performance of Jimmy Live at the Iridium
- 65 slow-motion examples with tablature
- An analysis video on Jimmy’s pickslanting mechanics
Take a journey into the world of bluegrass flatpick virtuosity in this Masters in Mechanics double feature!
This month we’re taking you on a trip to Winfield Kansas for the 2007 National Guitar Flat Pick Championships. Bluegrass is a unique world where mechanical standards, competition, and creativity work together to produce amazing players like Carl Miner. Carl won the whole thing as a teen, and placed second twice, including the year we interviewed him.
Read MoreCountry hero Albert Lee needs no introduction. He’s shared a stage with veritable pioneers of rock and roll, and his legendary ability to weave groovy, fluid lines through the changes has sent generations of pickers to the woodshed.
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
Cracking the Morse Code!
Steve Morse’s mind-boggling chops and peerless creativity have garnered him historical renown and captured the imagination of a generation of players.
His one-note-per-string alternate picking technique is one of the most magical in all of rock guitar. But behind the technique lies an amazing mechanical solution. In this interview, we not only witness the magic — we discover how it actually works.
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!