Hello, all! My name is Achilleus Ray. I’m a musician and private music teacher from Mississippi, and my aspiration is to be the best guitarist in the world. I’ve come here, to Cracking the Code–the Shaolin Temple of guitar technique–in pursuit of this, and I’m excited and privileged to be here. It’s thrilling to be a part of a community of such excellence, and I look forward to sharing this journey with the excellent people and musicians here.
My guitar journey:
- I’ve been playing guitar for nearly 12 years at this point, since I was 17 years old.
- I love a wide variety of genres and styles of music; I want to learn what people love about anything I can.
- What excites me about Cracking the Code is that this is, in a real way, the ground zero for the next steps of the development of the guitar. The level of technique here is unparalleled.
How I’ve gone about learning guitar so far:
- I’m totally self-taught, bar three lessons in my late teens. They were three very good lessons though.
- I’ve spent a lot of time on technique, and honestly I’ve been very, very lucky. The techniques I’ve learned organically happen to be mostly free of bad habits; however, it wasn’t until I discovered the CtC videos on YouTube that I started thinking scientifically about the mechanics of right hand motion particularly.
- I’ve watched a lot of the CtC free videos, though not all of them. One of the things I plan to do now that I’m here is go through the backlog in an organized way.
- I can play most of the traditional scales and modes comfortably; my max comfortable speed right now is around 180bpm at 16th notes.
- The single thing I’ve been stuck on the longest is the neoclassical section from the end of Crossroads. I’ve been working on it for a pretty long time now; I’ve been making a lot of progress now that I’ve seen the video with the 2wps in the diminished arpeggio.
Looking forward to contributing what I can! I’ll check back in once I’ve made some progress, or I have something new. Cheers!