I think my experience with Cracking the Code has been more “slowly incorporate as much of this stuff as I can into what I was already doing without radical changes”.
Before Code I did spend 6 months using a totally different pick grip because Ben Eller said so, and gained a fairly significant perceived boost when I finally decided to pack it in and go back to what I was doing before.
Yes! I have changed my fundamental right hand techniques a few times actually. I have some old videos to show the differences.
My earliest style was a deviation based pronated downward escape (UWPS for us that have a hard time converting to new lingo) setup. I sounded good and got great muting capabilities but it always felt a bit uptight so I tried to mimic Yngwies hand setup and came up with this around 2007. This is on the contrary a very supinated setup but still downward escape so the motion must have been some kind of wrist flexion and extension. I didn’t think about this at all at the time and I can’t recreate this way of playing today. Of course it didn’t have many similarities with Yngwie either. Sorry the vid is so dark.
At some point I came to the conclusion that that style didn’t sound good with anything other that distorted guitar playing so I changed back to my old style. I also wanted to learn to use hybrid picking so the pronated setup worked better for this. This is from 2009.
So i worked a lot at lessening the tension and after a few years it got better although I never really liked the feel of picking fast with this setup. It felt like work. This is from 2014.
But then I found CTC and found out about DWPS and forearm rotation so for the last few years I been working hard on burning a movement in that’s based around that. And although it might look like a lot more work, flinging the whole arm around, this is so much more relaxed style for me. This is from 2018.
I tried a lot but I just can’t do it. I have years of ingrained picking habits that I can’t break. CtC has made me more aware of using legato escapes but, aside from that, I can’t change unfortunately.
Yes!! I’ve changed picking styles a few times over a 34 years of playing
I used to hold the pick with two fingers and thumb for thrash muting (common thing I think because of the picking strength), and wrist deviation for picking. Holding pick like this also helped with starting runs on the low strings. I used to pick inside-inside, meaning a 3 note per string run I used to start on a down-stroke on every string - seems bonkers I know!, but I could still play wickedly fast. My thrash Muting was done with palm.
I had a brief “Skirmish” with economy picking after discovering it at a drunken jam! Totally loved it - superb tone, speed and clarity - sat well with sweep chords, super tight rhythm and lead mixing. But after a few weeks I found I just couldn’t get rid of the triplet timing sound it has - maybe it’s possible but I couldn’t do it - so I ditched it.
About 10 years ago I switched to holding the pick normally, when I saw Paul Gilbert switched (from the same two fingers hold technique as mine) and had a better tone, still stuck with wrist deviation at low speed and forearm rotation at high speed. Tho I wasn’t aware of this until a few month ago, and used to mentally call the forearm rotation - “The Shake”!. I also switched to outside picking after reading the Paul Gilbert string skipping stuff. Was still muting with palm.
Quite recently I switched to pure forearm rotation and thrash muting with pinky finger. Muting with pinky finger was the big break-thru for me - I found it so damn hard to mute using palm with forearm rotation - and still have flexible freedom. Also outside/inside picking is no longer a thing with rotation, It used to be a major thing with wrist deviation - because of the picking imbalance inherent in that technique (for me anyhow). This current combination I’m using is just plain awesome, I can switch between rhythm, lead, arps - whatever without any setup time, it’s all the same picking technique.
I found wrist deviation great - but the pick imbalance became more and more tricky as I learnt more and more stuff, so it became a huge maintenance thing - quite draining, to point of not learning stuff because I knew it would mess up all the stuff in the bank.
I had no consistent picking technique until I scrapped and started again in June 2017. From what I remember I was an UWPS and held the pick on the pad of my index finger or something. It was really fucked up and sounded terrible.
Actually now that I’m thinking about it I remember flip-flopping so much between styles before 2017 that I practically gave up using a pick for years. I basically got really good at playing the guitar like a piano with tapping only and thought I had no “genetics” for picking. Lmao.
That’s where I am at the minute - using tapping and legato. My picking has fallen apart completely as a result 
start back little by little. Its physiology, it HAS to work
I did. And trust me, my picking technique was garbage for years, I couldn’t even tremolo pick a single note at all. The main problem with my previous picking technique was my picking grip. I was holding my pick extremely close to my palm(it was actually touching my palm) and that way it was impossible for me to make an efficient wrist movement. I could only use my elbow that way and it just didn’t work for me at all, even at moderate tempos my picking was horrible. So one day I was determined to change that once and for all, so I changed my picking grip. Now I hold my pick away from my palm(similar to Paul Gilbert’s grip). At first, it felt really strange, it was a lot of trial and error experimentation for almost a month till the wrist movement finally clicked for me. Now with the addition of pickslanting into my playing, I can finally play some alternate picked stuff like Yngwie’s and Paul Gilbert’s at speeds I couldn’t even imagine playing before.
Thank you all SO MUCH for the detailed replies!!
It really does help encourage me tremendously!
I am sorry I have been absent from my own thread ; I work and have kids, so I’m pretty busy,
I’m very excited to be a part of this community, and I look forward to trying out the things I look forward to learning!
I don’t know where to begin. I’m waiting for the new Pickslanting Primer to see if it can give me a heads up.
I’ve been a UWPS player for many years, without realizing it, of course. When I came across Troy’s stuff, I deliberately tried to get into DWPS motions, and, while it doesn’t feel as natural as UWPS for me, still after some time I became able to play 2nps and 6nps licks at a decent speeds. For me, this was a new technique I was previously unfamiliar with. Also, realizing the fact that in some situations I have to rotate my wrist for easier switching between strings helped me.
I also tried to learn picking motion based on forearm rotation and finger movement, with it seems to be very hard for me, especially forearm. Although there seem to be some progress.
Still working on it, but yeah, after 35 years, I realized my right hand picking was holding back my left hand fingering, so I set out to fix that., and CtC was key. First off, I mostly dropped the picking from the elbow technique, which was about all I used before, I wanted finer motor control, so I started using the wrist, windshield wiper style. Then DPS, which is fantastic for 2 note per string playing (I never thought I could get my picking to match my hammer-on/pull-off speeds there but I’m closing in), and from there, wrist rotation or pronation/supination. Lastly, I’ve also started using my thumb itself just a little bit too, keeping it more flexible, for the really faster, finer, motor control. Not too much though.
Economy picking is another thing I picked up, but I still find upstrokes more difficult than downstrokes and my speed using EP leaves much to be desired at this stage.
Lastly, hybrid picking is something I’m only beginning to look at.
It’s been about 2 1/2 years since the change-ups, maybe 3. Playing perfectly clean and tight on certain runs is still a challenge for me, as radically changing my picking style after all these years is in some ways like relearning the instrument.
But I don’t regret the changes one bit. It’s been worth it.
I “remodelled” my technique over the space of about a year (2017-2018) because I was forced to. I was picking fast runs from my elbow (somewhat Petrucci style) and after nearly 35 years of doing that it was no longer sustainable. Even short practice sessions were starting to cause severe pain resulting in days of rest to recover.
I decided to try switching to what I thought was “picking more from the wrist” and coincidentally at the same time I was trying to work out Steve Morse’s “Tumeni Notes” and the “Glass Prison” arpeggios. I wasn’t aware of the TWPS/crosspicking thing but in trying to learn those songs it started to dawn on me what was causing my pick to get trapped on all those 1nps lines. More importantly it led to stumbling on alternating the pick angle and to CTC (via the Steve Morse video) so it was like a big technical crossroad for me.
Interestingly I was already aware of using a brief pick angle switch when playing 3nps patterns to cross strings where necessary it just never dawned on me all those years to pendulum back and forth between the two slants until I saw the Steve Morse video.
I think because I was trying to work all these things out at the same time it kind of allowed me to redevelop my picking naturally because everything I was trying to do was different to anything I had tried to do before so my old technique wasn’t really kicking in subconsciously as it didn’t work for any of these new movements and patterns.
I’m not sure how to describe my current technique (I’m not that familiar with CTC terminology 
) but it’s probably more of a forearm rotation thing. If I had to compare it to any of the guitarists interviewed so far I’d say it feels kind of in the “Teemu Mäntysaari” territory (though not as fast!) with some occasional on demand “crosspicking-ish” behaviour whenever it fits naturally. There’s also a little bit of side to side wrist movement sometimes depending on the pattern.
I should note that with Tumeni Notes the fastest I’ve ever been able to play it with minimal sloppiness is about 190bpm but without modifying my technique I’d never have come close to that. There’s still lots of progress to be made but I now feel technically more versatile, I can sustain long periods of fast picking, and my elbow is OK so I’m pretty happy.
I just wished I had figured this out 30 years ago!
Awesome playing… 
Any chance to post some close up video of 2WPS? Your recent RH motions look very airy and interesting.
Through the years I changed my picking technique from strict alternate, to economy. I also stopped anchoring my hand on the pickguard and my pick grip.
Thanks Groff!
Hehe, there is no 2WPS here. This is a one way DWPS (or UXS) style so I either use legato escapes or swiping (or sweeping i some cases) to go switch strings after downstrokes.
Ah I see. Anyway, hat’s off to you
I was a mediocre blues lawyer player for a long time, and then I went to a guitar school in my 30s to attempt to get a real education in music. Sadly, I had a teacher who taught his own special scales and completely terrible picking and fretting technique. After about 2 months his training method ended up destroying my hands and caused a bone spur on my left (fretting hand) thumb so I had to stop.
After a short break, I ended up having to spend a few years completely changing my fretting hand usage to undo that teacher’s damage and my inspiration for how I fret was Django Reinhardt. I saw videos and photos of him playing with only two fingers, completely turned down the fretboard, and in a more fluid relaxed way. I started copying him and simply turning my hand while I play completely fixed it and helped a lot. I then started to notice that just about every professional guitarist in the world turns their hand when they really play because…spoiler alert! Hands are supposed to turn and flex and move around.
Now I can play 3 note per string pentatonics on a 30" scale guitar and move freely between any key and scale by just turning my hand. Before I couldn’t play a basic scale on a normal guitar without intense pain.
Troy’s curriculum has been doing the same thing for my picking hand. Again, I was told to always keep my pick flat to the strings, and as Troy shows in his videos that just doesn’t work. Seeing him turn his picking hand similar to how I turn my fretting hand and then practicing the pick slanting techniques has fixed my picking hand as well. My speed and accuracy is increasing but–most importantly–it’s much more ergonomic and causes a lot less stress.
The key is to practice small motions repetitively very slowly and stay relaxed. I didn’t even use a metronome in the beginning since I was going so slow it wouldn’t make a difference and the metronome adds stress which kills the natural relaxed feeling I was trying to have while playing. I get the motion for just 1 or 2 string patterns down very slowly so that it’s fluid and relaxed and I can do it without thinking, then I add a metronome at a low speed. I inch it up and when I start to stress I back it off and hang out there for a while until it’s again fluid and natural, then inch it up some more. It takes time, but constantly relaxing and going slow eventually makes the frustration go away.
Once I got to where I was able to keep up with a basic tempo I then just started practicing jamming to random genres of music. I use a TRIO+ to just goof off, but I’m kind of “road testing” the new technique, trying to keep using it while I play and find the tempos where I can do it successfully. Sometimes I just play a scale over the chords or even just a 2 string riff until I do it in the new style.
I should also add that I’m 45, and really the only thing age does is sets a harder limit on how fast I could possibly go. Doing the actual technique isn’t necessarily age dependent.
I hope that helps.
I successfully changed 20% of it 
So, yes and no.
When I first started playying, I held the pick with a three-finger grip - thumb, pointer, middle. I was also a bad alternate picker, so thinking this may have had something to do with it, I migrated to a more traditional 2-finger grip. Worked flawlessly, except that as it happened that wasn’t my problem picking.
I signed up here while recovering from shoulder surgery in my picking hand arm (unrelated to guitar), with the intent of making the sort of switch you’re discussing. Hoiwever, what actually happened was I realized what I was already doing had a lot of potential but was optimized for certain things, some of which I wasn’t doing, and that I’d developed a number of coping mechanisms that I thought were inefficiencies but actually could have been useful (basically, I realized I was a default escaped downstroke player, with a bit of a rotational mechanic to allow occasional escaped upstrokes, and enough of a natural curve to my pickstroke to, with a little bvit of work, potentially allow it to handle double-escaped runs). So, rather than switching what I was doing, I instead worked on making what I was doing better, and finding things that it was likely to be good at.
Then, ironically, as a guy who’s always leaned on legato technique, I became increasingly aware that a lot of my issues were inconsistent fretting hand technique, so that’s where I am now.