Cracking the Code Scholarship

When he’s not touring the world with Alcatrazz, Joe Stump spends his days defending the dark arts of metal at Boston’s famed Berklee College of Music.

If Joe’s day job and his night job both sound a little scary, never fear. Despite his self-identification as a specialist in “evil chords” and “dark scales”, Berklee’s very own Professor Snape is secretly a wonderfully affable guy who’s always forthcoming about how he works his sinister-sounding magic.

Our discussion with Joe ranges from the harmonic to the mechanical, covering cool topics like arranging seventh chords with metal-friendly voicings, and comparing and contrasting the metal-ness of the harmonic minor, Hungarian minor, Phrygian Dominant, and Byzantine scales.

Of course, we also get a good close-up look at Joe’s famously fluid command of economy picking, including his Gypsy-style use of sequential downstrokes to link phrases at high speed. And no discussion of neoclassical techniques would be complete without an investigation of Joe’s awesome pedal-tone mastery.

When your day job involves giving away all your secrets to a small army of hungry shredders, you better do your homework. And at Berklee, Professor Joe Stump’s major is clearly minor.

The elbow is the simplest of the big-three arm joints, but it’s still highly capable as a core motion. It’s also the fastest joint in picking technique, generating the most rapid human motion ever measured in a laboratory setting, at over 300 beats per minute sixteenth notes.

The elbow does not possess the multi-axis capability of joints like the shoulder and wrist. Nor does it possess the rotational capability of joints like the forearm. Instead, it’s a simple hinge, moving the both forearm bones back and forth in a single plane.

For guitar players, what this means is that — as far as we know — the elbow is capable of only downstroke-escape or DSX motion. While this may sound limiting, the elbow is still highly capable as a core motion when supplemented by others. Forearm motion, wrist motion, and finger motion can all be incorporated to expand the elbow’s string-switching capabilities. Even when the elbow operates alone, techniques like sweeping and swiping can still be used to provide great mechanical variety for musical expression. In short, if you’re good at elbow motion, there’s every reason to get even better at it.

With so many picks available in just about every shape, size, and material, how do you choose one?

For our most compact introduction to pick selection, check out our lesson on “The Rule Of Roundness”. It’s a great summary of the most important ways that pick shape affects your playing. If you’re ready to start improving your technique, this single video is all you’ll need to select the right tools and get playing.

Looking for feedback on your playing technique? The Cracking The Code Instructor Team is on the case.

With a Cracking the Code subscription, you can upload clips of your playing for feedback from our instructors by making a “Technique Critique” right inside your account. You can access Technique Critique on your dashboard by clicking the “TC” icon:

In this section, we’ll take a look at how to film and upload videos, create platform Technique Critiques, or “TCs”, and make free public forum TC threads for feedback from the community.

The Pickslanting Primer is our instructional overview of the universe of picking technique.

It represents years of research and interviews with some of the world’s best players to understand how picking technique really works. It’s the most comprehensive instructional product of its kind, and it’s always getting better! In this quick overview, we’ll take a look at what topics we cover in the Primer, and how to follow along with the lesson sequence.

Alternate picking motion is the core of your picking technique, but not all motions that go back and forth fit the definition.

The most fundamental skill in picking technique is the ability to play a sequence of notes with a continuous reciprocating motion of the pick. In this section we’ll learn what a picking motion needs to accomplish to be a true alternate picking technique.

When it comes to holding a guitar pick, the method you choose depends to some extent on the type of picking technique you’re using, and the overall form that technique requires.

As with everything in picking technique, this multiplicity of correctness is actually the greatest challenge. With so many combinations of contact points and orientations that actually work, it can be hard to know which one to choose.

In this section, we’ll give you a quick overview of three of the most common grips in popular use, as well as a few pointers about less common grips used by famous players. Which one you use may change as you experiment with different techniques, but understanding how these common grips work is a great starting point.

Martin Miller’s spectacular alternate picking technique is one of the most-discussed playing techniques we’ve filmed. And it was initially also one of the stealthiest.

Before we interviewed Martin the first time, we had seen a few clips of him playing impossible things, like Steve Morse’s famous “Tumeni Notes” arpeggios. But it was anyone’s guess what was happening under the hood to make it possible. That all changed when we met up. Within minutes of walking through the door of his Leipzig apartment, the unique motion of his index and thumb was suddenly strikingly obvious in a way it had not been on video. Now we had a different problem: how do you learn it?

In this hands-on, workshop-style conversation conducted two years after our original meeting, we take a close-up look at Martin’s super-powered alternate picking motion with the goal of figuring out how it works. If you’ve seen our first two interviews with Martin, or spent any time trying to develop the motion he uses, then this conversation is a perfect complement to those efforts.

And as always when we sit down with Martin, his thoughts are wide-ranging, wise beyond the topic at hand, and a privilege to listen to.