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Grab your guitar, mandolin, bass, bouzouki, oud, or just about any other plucked instrument, and fire up your smartphone. You’re just a few steps away from getting a perfect, close-up look at your picking technique.
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From a chance discovery about efficient instrument technique, a decades-long journey of musical and mechanical discovery was launched. Here’s how Cracking The Code came to be.
Picks, Strings, and Videotape
Cracking The Code began in 1991 at, of all places, Yale University. With Yngwie Malmsteen’s infamous REH instructional video on seemingly continuous repeat in the background of a Timothy Dwight dorm room, concerted fumbling with a pick and an Ibanez Roadstar Series 240 guitar lead to a startling accidental discovery. Yngwie’s vaunted alternate picking technique wasn’t just a side-to-side motion of the pick, but rather a diagonal one. By picking along a trajectory that allowed upstrokes to move away from the guitar’s body, he could move from one string to another at any speed, with very few mistakes, so long as the final pickstroke on every string was an upstroke.
The observation solved one of the thorniest mechanical questions surrounding playing a stringed instrument with a pick: namely, how you move from one string to another without hitting the surrounding strings. Not only that, but the realization that Yngwie was almost exclusively favoring phrases with this seemingly unusual “upstroke as the last pickstroke” design flew in the face of everything we were taught about how elite guitar technique is supposed to work.
Dot Matrix Shred
An independent study outlining this discovery was soon underway. Under the supervision of Andrew Leonard in the guitar department, the result was a 48-page manuscript introducing concepts like pickslanting and stringhopping. Both were breakthroughs in understanding one of the most common solutions to the problem of efficient string switching, and neither were yet part of mainstream guitar instruction.
The paper also applied the concept of chunking, drawn from psychology research on memory and learning, to the problem of hand synchronization during high-speed playing. This part was actually a coincidence. Chunking was already employed by motor learning researchers to describe how complex sequences of motions are encoded and recalled. But we didn’t find that out until years later, in our interview with Pietro Mazzoni from the Motor Performance Lab at Columbia University.
Filming The Impossible
The paper raised more questions than it answered. If players at Yngwie’s level were doing things like this, what else might they be doing? Wouldn’t it be amazing to get a close-up look at real, live expert players, to see what other tricks they might have up their sleeves? But that would have to wait for technology to catch up. It eventually did, in the early 2000s, with the advent of affordable high-speed digital cameras.
The idea was simple enough: build a system that could film picking motions which are too fast or too small to see with the naked eye. After two years of after-hours coding and testing, the initial rig, affectionately referred to as the “ShredCam”, was born. It was a computer-controlled FireWire camera intended for industrial and scientific applications. It attached to the guitar body pointing at the player’s picking hand, and could output high-quality uncompressed Bayer pattern video at hundreds of frames per second. This was way beyond the speed of consumer cameras of the time, and fast enough for the most terrifying human guitarists.
Somehow, an array of incredible players agreed to attach this crazy contraption to their guitars while playing impossible phrases. This series of interviews included picking pioneers like Michael Angelo Batio, Rusty Cooley, Steve Morse, and Albert Lee. The rig even traveled all the way to Winfield, Kansas, to film bluegrass virtuoso Carl Miner at the famed Walnut Valley Festival National Flat Picking Championships.
The footage we captured was nothing short of amazing. It marked the first systematic attempt to film elite players up close, to understand and categorize the different escape motions they make. This focus on fieldwork continues to be a defining element of what we do today. To share clips of the interviews, the project also gained its first web site, and a placeholder name which ended up sticking around: Cracking The Code.
The Motor Learning Mystery
One of the most surprising things we’ve learned in our interviews is how self-taught virtuosos learn complex picking techniques.
For example, the sequence of upstrokes and downstrokes that elite players choose is not random, and not purely a matter of personal preference either. It’s based on fundamental differences in their mechanics. A player with one type of picking motion might need to terminate each string with an upstroke, like Yngwie did. Among our early interviewees, Mike Stern turned out to be one such player. But other players might only reach maximum efficiency when finishing each string with a downstroke. Michael Angelo Batio was one of those.
Prior to Cracking The Code, it was not widely known that choosing a different type of joint motion might require a different sequence of pickstrokes on each string to avoid awkwardness and errors. The technical explanation for this, and advice for what to do about it, were simply not part of mainstream guitar teaching.
But the players we interviewed were different. Their vocabularies contained a high proportion of picking patterns that could be played efficiently with their core mechanics — more so than you’d predict from random chance alone. How did they know this was necessary, and why weren’t they talking about it? Was it a conspiracy, to keep the rest of us from learning their secrets? The interviews answered that question clearly too: Amazingly, they were mostly doing this subconsciously.
Subconscious Streamlining
Over years of practice, the best players learn to gradually weed out problematic picking patterns in favor of ones that feel the smoothest and sound the most accurate. Eventually, their vocabulary becomes dominated by phrases that match their motion type, even if they’re not aware of developing these preferences. This subconscious feedback loop is the core of how complex motor skills are learned, from throwing a ball to riding a bike.
Listening to Mike Stern’s famously inventive blend of rock and bebop, it is hard to imagine there is anything he couldn’t play with a pick. It’s even harder to believe that his accuracy is based in part on unconsciously avoiding phrases that are likely to be inaccurate with his mechanics.
And yet Mike’s lines contain an unusually high percentage of picking patterns which can be played with what we call “upstroke escape”, or USX picking motion. Rather than being limited by this, Mike is simply a great example of a world-class player whose technical skills evolved to complement his musical choices.
The power is knowing this. When you realize that a beginner can dramatically speed up the learning process by doing something similar — intentionally avoiding specific phrases that can’t be played efficiently with their current technique — well, that would have blown minds in 1986.
Technique Taxonomy
When Cracking The Code began, the terminology we use now didn’t exist yet. So we introduced our own vocabulary for things we were seeing with our cameras. The terms we created, including escape motion, pickslanting, stringhopping, edge picking, swiping, and more, describe things players have always done, and either haven’t had a convenient way of explaining, or were simply unaware they were doing. This eventually grew to so many concepts that it amounts to a new, more structured way of thinking about guitar playing skills. Odds are good that if you’ve searched for information about developing effective picking technique, you’ve already run across players discussing their playing using our Cracking The Code terminology.
Evidence-Based Teaching
Here’s the problem with teaching: good advice isn’t good because it worked for one player, or because a famous person said it. It’s good if it reliably produces better results than you can get by accident.
And the only way to know that is to test it.
So we didn’t stop at research. We’ve taken everything we’ve learned and combined it with extensive testing and round-trip player feedback in our community. We’ve reviewed thousands of user-submitted video clips of their own playing to weed out which of our advice produced good results and which didn’t.
We then turned around and used this information to create simple and effective methods for diagnosing your own technique and learning new ones. Our core instructional product, the Pickslanting Primer, is updated constantly as our knowledge improves. We’re continually adding to our in-depth seminars on specific musical subjects. Our goal is to make learning effective picking technique as painless and approachable as possible.
At Cracking the Code, we apply evidence-based methods to musical teaching, to help guitarists master technique and unleash their creative freedom. We pioneered many of the concepts that are now used by players around the world to understand and perfect their picking technique.
Prior to Cracking the Code, it was not widely understood that expert players use specific joint motions to switch strings with accuracy at high speed. We revealed this phenomenon in 2014 with our groundbreaking Cracking the Code dramatic series, and in our continuing in-depth interviews, analyses, and technical features on well-known players.
Along the way, we introduced an array of new terminology, including escape motion, pickslanting, two-way pickslanting, stringhopping, edge picking, swiping, and more, to describe techniques that were once learned largely subconsciously by self-taught picking pioneers. These techniques, and the language we created to describe them, were simply not part of mainstream stringed instrument instruction until we began teaching them publicly.
Team
Who’s responsible for all this awesome stuff? This is us:
History
To put it simply, by 2014 there was still no instructional video you could watch or guitar lesson you could take to learn why Yngwie Malmsteen favors lines that contain an even number of pickstrokes per string when he’s alternate picking. Similarly, there was no guitar magazine you could read to learn why John McLaughlin, mysteriously, heavily favors phrases where the final pickstroke on every string is a downstroke — even supposing you noticed this strange detail in the first place. These seemingly idiosyncratic preferences turn out to be mechanically linked to the techniques of these two revered players in such a way that mere mortals all around the world were suddenly able to tackle their phrases once they knew why.
Learn how these breakthroughs came to be:
World-Class Interviews
Our groundbreaking series of interviews with incredible players is the first systematic attempt to understand and categorize the different picking motions great players make. We use slow-motion video to film techniques in action with an unprecedented degree of close-up detail. In many cases, this allows us to film motions that the players themselves are not aware they are making. And in at least some of these cases, we’ve captured footage of techniques that simply weren’t filmable without tiny high-speed video cameras, and most likely hadn’t been seen in such detail before, if at all. Our interviews are documented with exhaustingly detailed transcriptions in Soundslice:
World-Class Instruction
We didn’t stop at research. We’ve used everything we’ve learned to create simple and effective methods for diagnosing your own technique and learning new ones. On the site, you can dive into our instructional products like The Pickslanting Primer, our core instructional guide to learning picking motions, and watch our longer-form Seminars on specific musical topics:
World-Class Analysis
Our original 2004 slow-motion camera rig was a computer-controlled contraption of mounting arms and wires that let us film instrument technique in a way that had not been done before. When smartphones first acquired slow-motion capability in 2013, we responded by creating a custom phone mount for guitar, The Magnet. We used Magnet prototypes for years as a critical component of our interviews with great players. We delivered the first production-run Magnets to Kickstarter backers in late 2022. The Magnet goes on sale for everyone in 2024:
World-Class Feedback
Subscriptions also include Technique Critique, a collaborative review of your playing by our team of instructors. Our unique team-based approach to teaching mechanics applies our collective experience and data gathering to the problem of making you better:
The forum is free, and filled with a wealth of playing and experience and knowledge. All you need is a basic account on the site:
Great! How Do I Get Started?
Products like the Primer, Seminars, and Interviews are available via subscription or download. The download version offers lifetime free updates, as well as lifetime access to the web versions of all these products. But the web versions are actually the better versions. They include reference sections unlike anything in any other instructional product, that mix printed content, video clips and images that aren’t technically possible to download. They also contain additional features like timestamped tablature examples powered by the awesome Soundslice player.
A Cracking The Code subscription offers unlimited access to all this amazing stuff, including all instructional products and interviews. When you’re ready to dive in, check out our signup page:
Technique Critique is a Cracking the Code feature that lets you get personalized feedback based on short clips of your playing.
Rather than provide one-size-fits-all teaching about how things “should” be done, Cracking the Code takes an evidence-based approach based on years of data gathering from interviews with elite players, researchers, and lessons with players who have come to us for help. By viewing short video clips of your playing, we can quickly identify issues that we’ve seen many times before, and recommend adjustments used by expert players with similar techniques.
You can access Technique Critique two ways:
Platform Critique
By uploading your video clips directly to our platform, you can get guaranteed feedback from our instructors. You’ll also have the option to make these critiques private, viewable only by you and the instructors. Even if you choose to make them visible on the platform, instructor feedback will only be readable by you and other subscribers.
Technique Critique, or “TCs”, are stored in your TC library, with titles, dates, and easily recognizable poster frame images. The clean organization of your TC library is designed to allow instructors to quickly get a sense of what you’ve been working on, and what next steps to recommend. It’s also a great way to chart your own progress.
Platform critique is a subscription feature, but if finances are an issue, you can apply for a Cracking the Code Scholarship, which offers full site access, including Technique Critique.
Forum Critique
By creating a thread in the “Technique Critique” section of our forum, and including links to publicly viewable videos stored on external video sharing sites like YouTube, you can get feedback from members of the highly technical Cracking the Code community.
Our forum is public, so any critiques you post will be readable by anyone, even those who are not logged in. While instructors can and often do respond to forum critiques, their response is not guaranteed.
Sounds great! Where do I go from here?
You’re probably excited to get rolling, but if you simply make a critique and ask us to “analyze” your playing, that doesn’t give us much to go on. Not only that, but the questions you have may already be answered in our instuctional material.
That’s why the Technique Critique process works best after you’ve gone through the introductory steps in the Pickslanting Primer. This includes the table tap tests, tremolo tests, and the process for identifying your joint motion and escape. This will give you the basic terminology you need to ask really clear questions using language that instructors and community members will understand.
If you’ve already watched that material and haven’t found what you’re looking for, no problem — fire away! We’re here to help.