Picking motion is the core of your technique, and you can do it in all sorts of surprising ways. In this section, we’ll learn how to recognize these motions and understand the differences between them.

We’ll take a look at fundamental concepts like alternate picking, and learn what a picking motion needs to accomplish to be a true alternate picking technique. We’ll also introduce groundbreaking Cracking the Code concepts like escape motion and pickslanting. We’ve tried to make this big-picture overview as simple and visual as possible, with lots of examples from the interviews we’ve conducted.

To follow along with our tutorials, it’s helpful to have some familarity with the concepts we cover here, but you don’t have to tackle them all at once. We’ve included the important terms right in the title of each page, to make it easy to look them up later on if you need a reference.