Despite fifty years of rock guitar and nearly eighty years of jazz guitar, only a small fraction of players have ever developed truly virtuosic technique. This low percentage of guitar masters is at striking odds with other areas of music study. While almost any conservatory can produce a pianist capable of nailing Chopin's Revolutionary Etude, how many guitar students anywhere have mastered Yngwie's I'll See The Light Tonight? Or Steve Morse's Tumeni Notes? Or Django Reinhardt's Nuages?

The reason is that guitar mechanics are not well understood. The cause is the anecdotal, unstandardized, and largely unscientific nature of guitar instruction. Ask ten accomplished shredders, jazzers, or bluegrassers how they hold their picks, and you'll get at least ten answers. What's been missing is an objective investigation of what constitutes efficient guitar playing, and how celebrated masters actually achieve it.

Missing that is, until now.

Introducing Cracking the Code, a first-ever documentary of picking technique. Cracking the Code is not simply a compendium of performance footage. Nor is it a collection of licks demonstrated by masters. It is a unique mechanical investigation that uses slow-motion video to answer the question of how picking technique actually works. The principal tool in this investigation is the ShredCam, a guitar-mounted, high-speed camera that lets us perform up-close analysis of technique. The ShredCam captures hand movements at frame rates several times that of standard broadcast video, and the ShredCam software slows the footage down for further scrutiny.

Remember those movies in science class of bullets shattering apples in slow motion? Or droplets exploding into unusual coronas as they pierce the surface tension of a glass of milk? ShredCam footage is similarly revealing. It turns out that there's a good reason master players don't often agree on what constitutes correct technique: they're not aware they're using it. Like professional athletes, virtuoso guitarists develop subtle habits over the course of their formative practice years which are the prime enablers of their extraordinary ability. These hand and finger motions are executed only semi-consciously, frequently at speeds invisible to the naked eye. Yet they form the core of all successful picking techniques, and they are the principal reason why certain guitarists can seemingly play almost any line rapidly and cleanly. This is also the reason why so-called "average" players have difficulty replicating the performances of virtuosos, even after years of practice.

In other words: There's a trick to it. A bunch of them. The guitar was designed to be picked with your fingers, not a little plastic wedge. The difficulties this creates are significant, and naturally gifted players instinctively employ a range of methods to overcome them. Some of these methods, like sweep picking, have become mainstream. Others have never been noted or explained before now. Cracking the Code will describe how they work.

Cracking the Code is still in production, and there is much more yet to come. There will likely be numerous additions to both the cast and structure as work progresses. If you'd like to receive emails with movie updates, click the mailing list link above and enter your email address in the box provided. Your address will not be used for any purpose beyond sending update notifications from this site, and you can unsubscribe at any time.