Being good at something doesn’t make you good at teaching it as well.
There are many great players out there but only few of them are great teachers as well… Troy is one of them.
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I guess it’s the old joke, how many guitarists does it take to play a guitar solo?
101 :
1 to play it and 100 to stand in the audience thinking about how they would have played it better.
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This all reminds me of a short anecdote of Richard Feynman, theoretical physicist, Nobel laureate in physics and a really cool guy - for those who don’t know him. It’s about the criticism that science destroys the beauty of nature:
I agree with @elephantricity, it’s elitist or even a bit “religious”. It was nice to see that Marty Friedman and Andy Wood were really in between both worlds and really appreciated the value of analyzing all the mechanics. If you don’t see the value in it, you are simply ignorant.
However, one has also to say that being a good guitarist doesn’t mean that you are qualified to tell or teach people how to play. And that’s the thing: a good teacher cannot be ignorant to analyzing motion mechanics at a point where it’s needed. It’s like alternate vs. sweeping, there’s a place and time for each of them.
And btw since somebody mentioned the Wizard of Shred. This guy’s slogan is “Get Better Faster With Less Effort” (what a stupid slogan) but he’s criticizing that pick slanting is a shortcut. I think his reaction simply shows that he’s jealous that it wasn’t him finding out about that whole thing, since apparently almost everybody is slanting to some degree.
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My read on Marty Friedman was that his response was essentially: “I have no idea what you’re trying to say, but if it helps people, then great.”
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You must be listening to a different Marty Friedman to the rest of us I guess 
I don’t hear out of key circus music I hear great note choices. He never said he doesn’t know scales just that he tends not to think in those terms. For sure he knows what he’s doing.
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The thing about CTC is that it has broken down the mystery of alternate picking and it really is quite a simple concept.
Over the years so many books have come out and their philosophy has been “practice these licks and you’ll get faster.” This is only the case for some people and it depends on the licks and what type of pickslanting a player uses.
A lot of players get frustrated because they were unable to get past a certain BPM, now we have CTC it solves this problem and it’s such a simple concept that a lot of teachers have missed out on and I think that’s why they are slightly angry. They are probably like “why didn’t I think of this myself?!?!”
I have now seen a book that talks about pickslanting and an internet guitar teacher has made a video about how a certain player uses DWPS, although he uses slightly different terminology. He also talks about supination.
Troy has truly brought a highly detailed look at picking and solved the mystery. We now have to take this info and use it and practice. All of a sudden those fast licks are playable with a lot of practice.
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Off topic, but Marty really does come off as a colossal douche when he criticizes the things that might motivate other guitar players. I’m sure he really doesn’t give a toss about any of the code stuff.
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Anyone who’s ever had physio therapy for tennis elbow knows what supination is. I’m going through it at the moment 
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Well, I just found this. Apparently, if you just practice enough, you will get fast. I’m sure a lot of people here, including @Troy and me, know from personal experience that this isn’t true.
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Mr Levin needs to study a bit more of the work of Dr Kageyama and the like.
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As soon as somebody does something beyond the local scale, there will be a lot of haters. Human nature. It´s envy, it´s ignorance, it´s feeling attacked by new views, it´s wanting to feel better when putting others down. I assume most of the haters are not open to suspend their assumptions even just for a short while and get first hand experience. Almost everyone is being called a scam artist, a snakeoil saleman, a faker, a cheater etc…put in random names on google and add the suffix, it´s hilarious!
I can never say anything about anyone unless it´s my experience and even then - it´s only my experience and somebody else might feel exactly the opposite.
For thousands of years we have been forming groups XYZ and this group is always against group WZX - and even though we have created immense destruction with that mindset, it still is the human pattern. Why not be open and learn as much as one can? Why also assume that a person is either in or out, just because I didn´t like one statement?
If we can only accept to learn from a person who has 100% the same views with no deviation on any topic whatsoever - we´d be alone and not learn anything.
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Haha this guy even did a video where he said pickslanting is a bad habit / shortcut and that one needs super precise control of pick depth instead (pick depth!???).
Then he proceeded to play some examples where he was clearly using pickslanting to change strings. I facepalmed so hard I knocked myself out!
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I’m reading Mindset by Carol Dweck at the moment, and in it she discusses Malcolm Gladwells finding that people like to believe that some people are just born with super human levels of ability and or talent. There’s actually a lot of resistance to the idea that ‘talent’ is mostly hard work really. Maybe because most people don’t want to deal with the idea that they could be great at something if they just put in the effort (that last part is my own theory 
Maybe that’s related to a resistance to a more scientific approach to guitar technique.
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That’s my impression as well. It’s much easier to say that somebody is just talented or has a gift from their deity of choice than it is to find out how to do things and then practice doing them.
Also, in many cases it could be just about getting lucky and randomly finding the right solution to a problem. It’s not hard to attribute somebody’s success to talent when you put a lot of time into practicing it and never got anywhere, even though you only failed because you didn’t find the right way to do it.
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I have to give Levin credit for two things at least. He can play like a mofo and after watching a few of his videos CTC showed up in my youtube recommendations and that’s how I found Troy’s stuff His free licks/lessons on his old blog are pretty good too.
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I think that rather than vilify someone like Claus, we should merely notice that he says some things we understand not to be true, and then step back and consider whether there are other things he says that are true. I think we should hold ourselves to the same standard of open-mindedness that we hope for from others. I couldn’t even begin to count the number of people I’ve learned things from despite the fact I was aware they had certain other things wrong.
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Well said! And although I disagree on the pickslanting thing with him, I´ve learned tons from Claus Levin and his (not necessarily technique related) approaches and also from many others that all got their share of haters. There is so much emotion and attachment to views involved, instead of taking things to our practice lab and experimenting with it.
He refers to Yngwie when talking about the player whose technique is really not that accurate when heard on an acoustic - I always thought that Yngwie´s technique is freaking accurate…what´s your take on this?
Claus gets damn near flustered when talking about anything that isn’t part of his own programs. He sweats, bumbles and moves erratically. His take on pickslant was weird and defensive.
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You are right, I shouldn’t judge the guy based only on that video. I will try to refine my statement: my main issue is that it seems he didn’t try to understand Troy’s work before criticising it.
I am worried that this attitude may lead some of his followers to waste their practice time by trying to avoid pickslanting at all costs.
Also, to be fair he is definitely a good guitar player.
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I’ll clarify that I wasn’t trying to “call out” anyone here. Also, I’ve made my fair share of negative comments about people over the years, some I stand behind, some I regret. But even people I feel disdain for (who I won’t name, but there are at least a couple in the youtube guitar community), I acknowledge that on any given day, they might be able to teach me something. That doesn’t mean I stay subscribed to youtube teachers I dislike; life is too short for that. But if someone personally recommends a video or I see something intriguing in a title, I try not to let my general opinion stop me from clicking (with a small number of exceptions, where I feel the person’s videos have wasted my time once too often).
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