I originally found Cracking the Code because I was frustrated at the differences between improving my technique on the drums, where it always seemed I could pick up any exercise almost at random, work through it and immediately improve an aspect of my playing, and guitar where… I mean, those of us who struggled all know what it was like Before the Code.
With this in mind, if we were to compile a list of 40 essential rudiments for guitar, like the list that exists for the drums, what ought to be on it? What order? What SHOULDN’T be on it?
Does everything need to be resolutely non-musical in order to count as a rudiment i.e chromatic, or even picking muted strings?
Do I like asking questions more than I like answering them?
I was going to have a crack at making a tentative list but permuations of pickslanting, initial stroke direction and the possibility of swiping soon got me confused. Even just thinking about 4, 3, 2, and 1 note per string chromatic or dead string patterns.
Offhand, I don’t think being non-musical is a requirement for something to be thought of as a rudiment.
However, I think sometimes rudiments will be designed to isolate a movement and reduce cognitive overhead, and when you design an exercise with those priorities, the result will often be non-musical.
I think the old-school four-note-per string chromatic warmup/exercise is a classic example of this idea. And from a CTC perspective, it has the benefit of having an even number of notes on each string.
Philosophically, I think this notion of “rudiments of shred” is part of the reason some people think shred sounds boring. I think there probably are some de facto rudiments that we’d recognize if we did a statistical breakdown of musical phrases from famous “shred” recordings.
This is a good question that has come up a number of times. It’s also a question which gets at core issues of mechanical learning which musicians in general are still trying to figure out.
You ever notice that pro-level jazz and fusion drummers are almost all incredible? As a guitarist, you can’t help but notice, right? You can go to a fusion gig, and the drummer will be insane. The guitar player might have McLaughlin chops. Or might not. But the drummer will almost always blow you away. It’s like a running private joke in my mind, “all jazz drummers are great”. It happened again last month. Saw these guys at Drom in NYC. Never heard of them but they were great players, and the drummer melted faces:
And yet, drumming is obviously physically complicated. And relatively few drummers I’ve spoken to can actually explain how they do things like double-stroke rolls, or what’s going on specifically in their mind when they keep perfect time across a ten-minute song. So what’s going on here?
I play a little drums, self taught, which includes some experience in marching band in high school. I’m nowhere near Drum Corps skills, but the experience gave me a sense of how that world operates. The rudiments thing in particular, is very specific. It mainly applies to sticking patterns that you’d find in marches. It doesn’t really concern hand/foot coordination like you’d need on a kit, and it doesn’t relate to timekeeping across weird changes you’d find in your average fusion song. I’m sure practicing rudiments helps these things, but it’s not as direct as actually practicing those things.
More importantly, rudiment teaching doesn’t appear to delve too deeply into how the hand movements themselves are actually achieved. Nobody at the band camp I attended could really explain how a double-stroke roll was supposed to work, whether fingers or wrist or arm movements are involved, what kinds, and so on. I’ve since sat down with professional-level drummers who play with the guitarists we’ve interviewed, and had similar experiences. Anecdotally, my guess is that there is generally more mechanical awareness in drums than guitar, because drummers think about these things and talk about them. Do a search for Buddy Rich’s single-handed roll technique on the tubes and you’ll find plenty of examples. But despite this, there are still plenty of players who didn’t learn that way and don’t think about it.
And it’s not just drums. Every time I meet with bowed stringed instrument players, I’ve asked similar questions to what we ask on guitar. How is such and such movement achieved? How is intonation achieved, physically, with no frets? What are your landmarks? What parts of your instrument do I have to remove before you can no longer locate a pitch? I’m am absolutely sure there are players out there who have thought about these kinds of things. However, in my admittedly highly anecdotal sampling, most of the answers I’ve gotten are, for lack of a better term, ‘vague’.
It’s weird!
Of course there are a lot of factors here, and instruments like violin and cello have been formally taught for a long time. But that in itself is not a magic bullet. My best guess is that through some process of trial and error, that world has settled on some basic advice that seems to work for enough players enough of the time, so that attaining basic technique is not considered “problematic”, and teachers don’t really need to understand “mechanics” the way you might expect. I suspect if you dig around there, you’ll find students who are failing who shouldn’t fail. In other words, students who could succeed with more specific teaching. That’s just a hunch.
Similar situation appears to exist on drums. If you interview 100 players and only a few of them can explain, let’s say, how their roll technique works, but they each do it a different way and they’re all great at it, what can we conclude? Well, maybe, as complex as those movements are, they’re still achievable by a reasonably dedicated person with some combination of teaching and trial and error.
In other words, TLDR, if we’re looking to explain why people progress more quickly on some instruments than others, I’m going to guess that it’s not the teaching, because mechanical teaching seems to be lacking for a lot of instruments. Instead, I’m going to guess that some instruments are simply “harder” than others. And by “harder” I mean very specifically, the percentage chance of success in acquiring proficiency given a certain fixed amount of teaching and practice.
If, when you control for teaching and practice time, you find that capabilities among students are lacking more for certain instruments than others, that’s one potential definition of ‘hard’ that actually makes sense for us to think about.
Is picking technique ‘hard’? Is it ‘harder’ than drumming technique? Is it ‘harder’ than piano technique? Will things like rudiments help? These are all complicated questions. But they are questions which we can standardize and then test.
I guess one thing I haven’t thought about is that drumming is big movements, large muscles, whole limbs, with varying degrees of finesse at the hands and feet, thus a completely different sort of task than moving one hand back and forth a tiny little bit while twiddling the fingers on the other hand.
I’ve focused on rudiments here, where the big difference might be the established terminology around different stick grips and the few basic different ways of smacking the things up and down on a goat skin or whatever. Foot technique is perhaps a bit trickier but the likes of George Kollias, Derek Roddy etc are happy to share rather than hoard their secrets, so you can fairly soon get a handle on what is an endurance issue and what is technique issue (i.e. you wont play double kick 16ths at 220+ by starting at 100 and working your way up with the same technique)
Similarly I taught myself a bit of saxophone (no time to play the thing any more, two young children and something had to go out the window so it’s maybe 3 years since I had a blow on the thing), and the established methods of Teal and Allard (as relayed by Dave Liebman and others) made it fairly easy to get started. I’d almost be inclined to say that saxophone just has a single “rudiment” - play long tones.
My outlook is all from a “self-taught” point of view in that I haven’t had a sit-down lesson with a private teacher since I was about 12, but there’s such a wealth of info and lessons out there these days that it isn’t as if I’ve had to sit and work everything out on my own.
I’m not a drummer, but from what little I understand about drumming, I really do think there’s a kind of conceptual similarity between Moeller technique and fast forearm-rotation picking in the gypsy/Friedman/Van Halen style. Not that they’re literally the same movement, or you have the same kind of literal “bouncing” in picking, but I find there’s a kind of almost involuntary elastic-feeling quality to fast dwps with forearm rotation.
I’m with you in the elastic-feeling, and I made a massive amount of progress when I stopped thinking of down and up stroke as two distinct movements but more like a movement and a return to the starting position which you get for “free”.
And guitar has a much larger sample size than any other instrument. Way more people attempt guitar than say, cello.
Our understanding of what it takes to succeed as a guitarist has largely been skewed by survivorship bias. The huge number of people trying to play guitar creates a large number of amazing players on the tail end, and that obscures mediocre (or even counterproductive) teaching methods in the earlier stages.
Heck yes for the sentiment “standardize and then test.”
A friend of mine has been playing drums for most of his life. He also learned a lot about playing piano. He told me that learning guitar is far more difficult than learning to play the drums or piano. So, perhaps there is some truth to the guitar being more difficult? Perhaps it’s a person by person thing?
I’m crap on drums and piano. I can fake my way with them, but I am far from proficient.
I’m a vocalist and multi-instrumentalist of guitar, banjo, pedal steel guitar, bass, and drums. I feel with drums, that once you have sufficient endurance, the hardest part to achieve is dynamics between different limbs. Playing ghost notes correctly and to a click adds another level of challenge to how well your brain understands the multi-limb groove! I’d argue that playing banjo in the “Earl Scruggs style” chord melody is even more difficult. You have various 3 finger rolls, harmony, melody, zero sustain, and you have to accent the melody “within” the accompaniment. Learning guitar and banjo lead me to “understand” bass and pedal steel guitar. That being said, I’m very interested in getting my magnet on some elite level banjo and pedal steel players out there to understand how much my knowledge of Pickslanting and Crosspicking applies to banjo and steel. Pedal steel is a notoriously secretive and the smallest community of all my pursuits, hands down. I had to hunt down a lot of 13 discontinued Paul Franklin instructional CD’s for about $300! Just audio too! Look up Travis Toy of Rascal Flatts and how effortlessly he shreds on the thing in his youtube improvisational flights. Interestingly emough, he plays often with Andy Wood.
I’m kind of beta testing something like this as I write out and test exercises. I’ve wanted something short and simple to keep my chops up despite a busy schedule.
The idea is to have several really short exercises that cover all kinds of fingering patterns and picking patterns geared towards shred guitar playing. Stuff like 4, 3, and 2 note coils, Gilbert sixes, Malmsteen fours, etc. Also breaking things up into ascending and descending patterns to keep with the number of beats I’m working with.
All the exercises last four full beats (either 16th notes or sextuplets) and then finish on the downbeat of beat number 5 and it’s finished.
So far, it seems helpful for me. I can get some decent practice done in 10 or 20 minutes, depending on how many exercises I do. And, it helps keep me on top of all the various things that can be done with shred guitar, which is a crazy amount!
