My name is Ian! I grew up on the Mississippi River in Illinois
I’ve been playing guitar for 17 years and I have made progress in the last month unlike any I have made in a decade!
I grew up on a steady diet of King Crimson so a lot of cross picking is on the easier side for me. However, I’ve always used a rigidly neutral pickslant (although I didn’t know it at the time) so certain passages were just way too hard for me and I had no idea how to make any progress on them
I really cannot thank Troy and the team enough. I have learned so much. I am so dang happy.
The thing that started me on this whole Cracking the Code adventure was a YouTube copy of Frank Gambale’s guitar exercise video. The idea that this video should be a warm-up and not an event in the Olympics blew my mind. Using hammer-ons and pull-offs I’ve always been able to play all the notes, but he was picking every single one and it sounded so much better than my playing. In particular, the simple act of picking a scale in 16th notes at 130 bpm sounded so cool and unlike anything I could do.
Long story short: the CtC Gambale interview led me to the website led me to the treasure
I can now play along to that whole video except for the sweep arpeggio section (which I am working on)! It really is amazing that something that seemed impossible a month ago is now pretty easy! Thank you again!
I have never taken lessons but I have pretty much always taught lessons since I got the hang of the basics. I am really excited to start making lessons based on trying to solve different technical issues that come up when trying to adapt different instruments to guitar. For example, I started really analyzing the planning of Charlie Parker when I was first studying jazz but reached a point where I had to make compromises to make some of the lines “possible” on guitar. His playing always sounded more aggressive and shreddy, and my approximations always sounded smoother and much less dynamic
My understanding of what’s possible on the guitar is now widely expanded and I’m really excited to go back and look at those Charlie Parker notes again. Charlie Parker is a player that uses small formulaic units that pop up a lot. For example there’s an arpeggio pattern that happens so often it averages out to about once every three measures. Figuring out different guitar solutions to these little Charlie Parker units that actually sound like his saxophone playing combined with an exploration of WHY he was playing those units sounds like a pretty fun exploration for me, and a useful little curriculum once I’m done
That’s just the first idea I’ve got though. I just keep realizing new implications of this stuff and getting very excited
