Troy Grady sacrificed a lot of Friday nights out in his formative years to give us all a gift. He and his team have unlocked and made available the deepest subconscious secrets of guitar shredding. In their groundbreaking Cracking the Code series, now in its second season, previously unknown virtuoso guitar picking techniques are broken down and dispensed thanks in no small part to 21st century tools like slow-motion recording and playback, smartphones, 3D printing, and streaming video. And the most masterful part of all? It’s all packaged like the epic quest that it is.
If you’ve got something to teach, know this: tutorials don’t have to be stiff and simple. Tutorials… can shred.
I talked to Troy Grady about the series, and I can only imagine that he typed his responses back on a Commodore 64 while eating Chef Boyardee straight from the can. Maybe that’s because it’s easy to get swept up in the nostalgic visuals and feel of the ongoing saga.
When it comes to tutorials, the go-to is a single shot screencast. Cracking the Code couldn’t be more of the opposite approach. Insane production, story arcs, archival footage, animation, rich soundscapes. Was it always the intention of producing something so… lush?
Thanks! It’s true, we do like to deliver a little Cecil B. DeMille with your C.C. DeVille. Partly this is the natural result of three or so years of sequestered development and constant refinement, during which time the whole look and feel of the show gradually began to orbit the barycenter of our various pop culture idiosyncrasies. But there’s a practical side. We dwell a lot more on the mysteries of guitar technique than any traditional guitar instructional video. And this is because the central premise of Cracking the Code is somewhat preposterous: that the world’s elite players enable their extraordinary abilities with an array of powerful techniques that they’re not consciously aware they’re using. Of course, we could have simply come out and said this. But we thought that if we gave you a story to follow along with—an archetypal, everyman kind of story—we might be able to go one better and make you feel it. And based on the fan emails we’ve received, apparently this feeling that there’s something else out there—some secret sauce that separates the greats from the rest of us—is a widely shared if tacit suspicion among guitar players. If so, we’re thrilled to be able to tap into something universal. It’s all very blue pill / red pill.
I’ve played guitar since I was fifteen, but I’ve never put any effort toward being any sort of shredder. That said, I’ve watched every single episode of Cracking the Code because it’s so entertaining. It’s a mystery, a thriller, an adventure. It’s a quest. Yeah, there’s no question here.
No shredding means you had a social life in your formative years. One that possibly involved beer, parties, and illegal drag racing. Continue this path. Save yourself, while there’s still time!
Tell me about the bedroom set. Troy, how close is it to your actual teen room?
The David Lee Roth banner and Star Wars Sheets are actually real. So is the Atari. My Mom saved them all. In the mid ’80s, Dave’s hypnotic gaze from on high warded off women for a least a quarter mile in all directions. Please reference my answer to the previous question for ways in which you may avoid this fate.
There have been guitar videos for decades. But nobody has deconstructed technique like this before. Are the Yngwies and the Eddies actually trying to keep their secrets from the world even as they teach, or is that essentially like asking a bird how it flies?
Believe it or not, I’m pretty sure they are being straight with us. This was a surprise, because in the ’80s, the technical arms race was highly competitive. Eddie reputedly played with his back to the audience in the club days to guard the secret of his tapping. I’ve since interviewed a number of players at this level, and I was expecting at least some reticence when it came to how the rabbit was pulled from the hat. But none of them were the least bit guarded or defensive about their playing. And considering they knew I’d be placing a high-speed camera a few inches from their hands, there’d be nowhere to hide even if they were.
I have a friend who’s a neuroscience researcher and also a big sports fan, and he always mentions how unusual it is that in music, we seem to expect that the best players possess a type of physical omniscience that we would never presume of even the world’s best athletes. In fact, in sports, it’s often the opposite. We have no problem imagining that Mariano Rivera doesn’t actually know how he throws the cut fastball (as he has actually stated in interviews), or that Larry Byrd had some ineffable radar-like ability to find the basket from center court. In fact, Paragon Sports actually used to have a driving range in their Manhattan store equipped with a high-speed camera rig. You could grab a club off the rack, hit a few balls into the net, and watch yourself in slow-motion playback. It was pretty cool. And it probably sold clubs, because even casual golfers are used to the idea that it’s difficult to understand your own technique.
When these types of tools are given out, entire communities can elevate. There’s an infant in Minnesota right now who will be twice the guitar player that anyone currently is. That or she’ll run a three minute mile someday. All that to say—what’s the speed limit on advanced picking? How creative and how fast and how accurate can it get?
Interestingly, it turns out the speed isn’t really the problem. Most guitarists can already move their hands plenty fast to be impressive players. The hurdle is that they can’t do so without mistakes. So it’s really accuracy that’s the hurdle. And it’s mainly that we have tended to conflate these two issues in a kind of caveman-like generality—”slow bad, fast good”—that has created decades of confusion for players. Finally pulling them apart leads to a host of amazing answers to problems in hand synchronization, and switching from one string to another, that we didn’t know existed. These are the problems we spend the most of our time on in the show, rather than speed itself.
So to get back to your original question, how fast can we move our hands? I don’t know! But investigated properly, it’s likely more of a physiological question involving fast-twitch muscle fibers, synapses, and Mountain Dew.
You’re a few episodes in to Season 2. How has the response been so far?
Everything kicked into high gear when we released the first episode of Season 2. I think we did ten thousand views in the first week. We’ve since released Episode 2 and that’s already up to twenty thousand views in a week and a half. Season 1 was the origin story—setting up the basic technical problems faced by all guitarists, and situating them culturally and historically, so viewers understand why attaining these skills was a part of your life’s journey more so than just a hobby. Season 2 is the part of the story when we start to make breakthroughs. The material becomes overtly more technical in nature, although we’ll never abandon the narrative vehicle since it’s really the best way to organize the concepts in a nice linear fashion.
We knew that Season 2 would be powerful for dedicated players. But in a David After Dentist world, we weren’t sure how that would translate in terms of popularity. Thankfully, I’m always happy to discover I’ve underestimated us.
There’s also a new seminar series called “Masters in Mechanics”. What’s different about this series?
The show is broad, and the seminars are deep. The show will touch on many players and topics over the course of Season 2, and offer a couple emblematic examples in each instance. But in the “Inside the Volcano” seminar, as an example, we spend two and half hours on what is essentially the story of a single episode of the show. We outline the basic breakthroughs of that episode, use that time to extrapolate numerous additional examples. We also cover topics not addressed in the show at all, like Yngwie’s rotational forearm picking mechanic. We do these via Google Hangouts and I have to say it’s pretty cool to be hosting what is essentially a virtual classroom that spans continents and time zones. It’s also cool to teach people who really want to learn. And it’s honestly a privilege to teach this stuff. It’s not every day you can say your syllabus contains subjects that have quite possibly never been taught before.
So speaking of teaching and getting deeply into the details, let’s talk about the camera mount.
The modern smartphone is the best guitar camera ever made. It’s tiny and flat. It’s got a built-in battery so it needs no cables. It’s got nearly limitless built-in storage and records forever. It’s got built-in lighting, and a built-in display for viewing playback. And of course the new slow-motion capabilities that debuted with the iPhone 5S are really unbelievable. You can now use your phone to record video at speeds that weren’t even possible on anything less than specialized scientific equipment as little as ten years ago. And the iPhone 6 has upped the ante to 240 frames per second. In HD, no less.
The guitar mount we’ve designed aims to be the simplest and best way to attach these incredible cameras to your guitar. Just snap it on, drop in your phone, and you’re automatically set up with the ideal framing for analyzing playing technique without straddling tripods or adjusting lights. I had only ever used the original scientific camera rig on myself a handful of times, but I use this thing almost every day. When you’re trying to capture lightning in a bottle during a practice session, simplicity makes the difference between capturing what you’re doing, when you’re doing it, or simply not using it all.
When are they going to be available?
Soon! We’re about to launch the Kickstarter. Brendan, on our team, has been investigating injection molding processes and calling factories, which frankly I didn’t even know were places you could just call up. And it has been an education in just how those disposable razors got on the rack at CVS. I saw George Washington’s actual uniform in the Smithsonian once, and it looked like a Halloween costume assembled by elementary school kids. But the manufacturing capability available to even the most pedestrian household item nowadays is really extraordinary. Our 3D-printed prototypes already work pretty well. But if we can bring a mass-market level of polish and precision to the final product, we’re really excited to do it.
You can get your season pass for Season 2 of Cracking the code here. In addition to all of the episodes, your pass includes downloadable course materials exclusively for season pass holders including slow motion footage, tablature, performance notes, and soundtrack packs. Happy shredding.