Hi everyone! My name is Francisco and I’ve been playing guitar for almost 10 years now. I have my B.A. in Music from CSU East Bay and I’m currently a guitar teacher in the SF Bay Area. I’ve been watching CTC since it came out on Youtube in 2014 and it’s been a huge game changer for my guitar playing. I can’t wait to get involved on the forum and meet other people who are just as into this picking thing as I am!
Here’s my guitar journey thus far. I started playing guitar when I was 16 after watching the scene in Back To The Future where Marty plays “Johnny B. Goode”. I remember saying to my friend “I wanna do that”!
I immediately went down the guitar rabbit hole and got into everything from 50’s Rockabilly to Blues, Metal and everything else in between. I got into the shredders like Satriani, Vai, Malmsteen, and EVH of course.
A year after I graduated high school, I started studying music in community college. The guy that ran most of the program was an MI graduate from LA, so I got this weird but cool approach to learning music. I got exposed to classical music, learned to read music, and gained a solid understanding of music theory while at the same time playing in bands that performed contemporary Pop, Rock, Soul, Funk, and R&B songs. From Bach to Motown to Stravinsky to The Beatles and Stevie Wonder. Again it was weird, but fun! I got a solid foundation in being a musician.
I also started studying Jazz at this time and was preparing to transfer to a 4 year school. This is where my frustration with my technique began. My lead guitar playing was largely influenced by blues players like SRV, Clapton, B.B. King, Hendrix, etc. so trying to play anything technically demanding was hard and frustrating. I remember listening to the Charlie Parker tune “Donna Lee” and being floored. The melody was crazy! Even if I could figure out the melody, how could I play it on the guitar with my technique (or lack thereof)? Even the amazing tunes from the shredders, like Satriani, scared me and I had no idea how to play them.
I also had fellow classmates of mine, who were shredders, smoke me when it came time to solo or when we’d jam together. Even if they couldn’t read or they didn’t know jack about music theory, their picking was amazing. I remember asking them how they developed their technique and each of them had a different answer and approach, if they could explain it at all. One guy kinda had a Marty Friedman DWPS approach while another guy had more of an EVH approach and so on. None of them could explain what they were doing in detail though.
So, I set out on my own to try and work on my picking. I practiced exercise after exercise with a metronome. I learned my 3NPS scale shapes and my CAGED scale shapes. I watched Paul Gilberts “Intense Rock” video and tried getting past the first exercise. I didn’t. I could play all these things at slow to medium speeds, or “Stepdad Speed” as Ben Eller says, and it would be clean and usable. But it wouldn’t make anyones head explode. It seemed like any time I tried to go to the land of shred, I would hit an invisible wall over and over again. When looking for advice online or from other guitar players, I would run into the same old outdated “guitar wisdom” from them. “You gotta play slow before you can play fast”, or “If you can’t play it fast, it means you’re not ready to play it fast”, or the ever popular “It takes a long time to learn to play fast. You gotta practice 8-10 hours a day for years and years and you’ll get there eventually”. Ugh! This frustrated me more. I gave up on my shredding dreams and got ready to transfer to CSU East Bay, hoping for the best.
This is where Troy and “Cracking The Code” came in. I remember watching season 1 and immediately relating to everything in the show. All of Troys struggles hit close to home for me. His frustrations were mine. I desperately wanted more after the season finished and couldn’t wait. Season 2 came out during the summer before I transferred and I started watching again. I saw the “Pop Tarts lick” and I immediately got to work on it. I could’t play it fast and I hit walls like before. Then the Yngwie DWPS system was introduced by Troy and it blew my mind. As I studied Jazz at my new school, I would slowly try to implement DWPS every now and then into my playing while I practiced. It was awkward at first, but I was eventually comfortable with it.
Things really got interesting when I purchased the season pass and I subscribed to “Masters in Mechanics” (I know this is beginning to sound like a big advertisement. But if you’re on this forum I’m sure you know how important this stuff is). The “Pop Tarts Lick” was there, but also “The Yngwie Sixes Lick”. I began to practice these two licks frequently starting in January. I focused on the chunking and DWPS aspects of the licks. I started to notice the metronome slowly increasing in speed. Not shredding yet but getting there. I then saw a Lick Library picking video by Guthrie Govan where he talked about “The Yngwie Sixes Lick” although he didn’t call it that. I also saw an old guitar website article where Paul Gilbert mentions the lick as well!
Here’s the link: http://www.intimateaudio.com/psycho_licks.gilbert.html
This only fueled my desire to practice more and I knew I was close to a breakthrough.
Then, in March of 2015, I remember I was in my bedroom one day. I decided I would try to go for it and try to play “The Pop Tarts Lick” at a fast speed. After a few attempts, BOOM! I could all of a sudden play the lick at a fast speed. Not as fast as Troy, but still faster than anything I had ever played with alternate picking. The sixes lick also came together around that time. I was ecstatic. I could actually play both of these licks fast, cleanly and consistently. Over the next few months I got them even faster. I started reorganizing all of my guitar vocabulary into the DWPS system. Everything from my Jazz licks to my Rock licks were played with DWPS and I could see immediate improvement with those licks as well. This was all less than a year after watching Season 2. DWPS was like the flux capacitor that made fast picking possible for me!
Since then I’ve incorporated elements of sweeping, and 2WPS into my playing for Gamble inspired 3NPS stuff as well as swiping for Paul Gilbert stuff which is a topic I hope to post about soon. I think I’ve gone on longer than I needed to, and I didn’t expect to write this much. But it’s pretty cathartic for me to write about this stuff, and thanks for sticking around if you’re still reading this. I just want to say big thanks to @Troy and the Cracking The Code team for all your hard work on this amazing resource. You guys have truly created something revolutionary. Thank you for being apart of my crazy guitar journey and I hope that you’ll be apart of it for many more.
