As the decade drew to a close, the pages of guitar magazines swelled with an eclectic palette of colors: heavy metal heroes and prog fantasists were now joined by the hometown hues of country and bluegrass. David Lee Roth built an MTV juggernaut around a music school alumnus. And an instrumental guitar solo by an underground fusion artist from Texas would eventually score a top-5 billboard hit and a Grammy. The limelight was as bright as ever, but the set design was no longer neon.

Somewhere in the distance, beyond the smoke machines and the flaming gongs, we felt the first muted tremors of change. The message was clear: adapt.

The path of discovery is less a gradual slog than a punctuated equilibrium of sudden insights. A chance meeting of CPU and sound had turned a toy synthesizer into the ultimate musical x-ray. Like a glass-bottom boat, it opened a window on a world that had existed only in imagination.

But as the pile of data grew, so did the frustration. Peeling back the armor of the guitar colossi only revealed even more complex rigging underneath. Rock videos and record collections had failed to provide all the answers. And this felt like a defeat. But that’s only because they had taken us as far as they could go. What we really needed now was a change of scenery.

We sat in the front row. We took good notes. We did the readings. We had good class participation. We even aced the midterm. But none of it would matter: They cancelled the course.

If the ’80s had arrived like a vortex, instantly dispersing the sweaty haze of disco and decadence, their sudden, unheralded departure was all the more striking. The wholesale abandonment of fretboard frippery was so swift, that by the turn of the decade, any recording featuring two-handed tapping may as well have been delivered directly to a sandy sarcophagus. The search for clues to the mystery of guitar mastery could no longer take place on pop radio. But that only made it that much more urgent.

If the secret sauce of a liberal education could be boiled down to one ingredient, it wouldn’t be humanities, and it wouldn’t even be beer. (Though a case could be made for sweatpants.) No, the ultimate enabler of the examined life would have to be none other than the singular catalyst of all great ideas since Pythagoras quit his day job at Dairy Queen: free time.

In the summer of 1991, Professor Malmsteen brought his medieval music appreciation class to VCRs everywhere. While pre-med students were busy pipetting their titrations, language majors, with only verbs to conjugate and almost no papers to write, were glued to their cathode ray tubes in an effort to deduce just what the good professor was trying to say.

Learn about the power of Yngwie’s alternate picking approach, and its key ingredient: downward pickslanting. The first in a two-episode cycle completely outlining the Yngwie picking technique.

We explore Yngwie’s ingenious system for integrating alternate picking and sweeping via downward pickslanting, and unlock his asymmetrical one-way pickslanting formula — among the most powerful picking strategies ever devised.

A complete blueprint of Eric Johnson’s picking technique, investigating the engineering genius behind his long, flowing pentatonic licks, trademark hybrid fives mechanic, unique one-note-per-string “bounce” technique, and more.

Michael Angelo Batio’s ingenious two-way pickslanting maneuvers are the secret to fast and efficient scale playing!