News

Do you have trouble synchronizing your hands? Is your picking slower than your fretting? Is your fretting slower than your picking? At Cracking The Code we hear these complaints daily. And our response is the same each time: How do you know? Without a rigorous plan for testing and streamlining both hands, it’s impossible to know why your playing sounds uncoordinated, or how to fix it. Until now.

With the release of our frighteningly good interview with horror-metal master Miles Dimitri Baker, we’re taking a slasher’s blade to prices across our entire metal collection – our biggest sale event since Black Friday. From now until Next Friday the 27th, our store has killer sales on all our Metal products.

Purveyor of fine horror-metal riffage and all-around amazing player Miles Dimitri Baker joins us for a deep dive on technique, tone, and the uncanny mechanics that make his guitar playing both terrifyingly tight and endlessly fascinating.

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!