Come on guys, I’ve been patient.
The interviews are the only reason I subscribe.
Not bashing, I just do not make use of anything else provided.
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Why do you want more interviews?
Personally I feel like the team has managed to find exemplars for most techniques out there. If more people with the same techniques are interviewed, what do we learn from that?
I’m much more interested in seeing more analysis and tutorial style content. We now know what these fantastic players do, the next leap is finding a way to teach this so everyone can get it.
As far as interviews go, if they were do to more of them in the near future, I’d be more interested in interviews in a similar spirit to the “playing through the changes” interview with Martin Miller. Specifically, I’m super interested in what mental models these players use. In his famous studies of experts, Anders Ericsson (the guy who had his work misquoted to give rise to the 10 000 hours of practice meme) found that one of the most important differences between intermediates and experts was the quality of their mental models. I.e how the structure information. In fact, intermediates that had plateaued could be made unstuck by adopting the expert’s mental models.
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I get where you are coming from. I’m patiently waiting for the Joe Stump interview before I resubscribe.
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9 months??? Wasn’t the last interview the Martin Miller one from December? Though it does seem like quite a while and I’m also itching for new stuff to be dropped…
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Has it really been that long?
If you’ve already completely mastered all the material from all the interviews so far on the site you must be one hell of a player.
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Hey, thanks for the nudge! It’s a fair question and you’re right, it has been a while.
I’m looking back, looks like Frank Gambale was just about 9 months ago. We did also release the Oz Noy Interview in October, and Martin Mechanics Workshop in December, and a couple live broadcasts (with Mika and Teemu) later last year. But no interviews yet in 2019. Good point here and we do want to get back to releasing some new interviews as soon as we can.
A few more thoughts on this:
This can be a tough balance because I know we do have some members who care mostly about interviews, and some members who care mostly about lessons / tutorial material. As always, appreciate the feedback here, helpful for us to hear what folks want to see most!
Looking back, we’ve managed roughly 8 major new releases (mostly interviews) per year pretty consistently over the last few years. Mixed in with that, we’ve done various shorter tutorial videos, blog posts, and things like updates to the Pickslanting Primer.
We have quite a bit more core tutorial material we want to add, and that’s a big priority for us this year. This has eaten into our time for other stuff like interviews, and that’s something we’ll have to work on balancing a bit better.
After we finish our current batch of chapters on picks and grip (two new sections of the Primer) we should be able to get a couple more interviews finished. No promises on exact timeline but Joe Stump will probably be one of the next up. We’ll most likely end up with fewer interviews this year, but several hours of other new stuff (e.g. Primer chapters) on things we think are really important.
While we have covered a lot of players / techniques, and don’t want to do interviews “just because”, I do think there’s more to be gained from selectively doing more of these. We always seem to learn something new, and/or gain a better understand of things we thought we knew pretty well already. We also get useful examples for the tutorial stuff, so ideally there’s a kind of synergy there.
Stuff re: mental models, how to best learn and teach these things, definitely all important, and we’ll keep this in mind! I do agree it’ll be great to get more analysis and tutorial out as well. One other thing we should have out pretty soon, along these lines, is a big feature on Frank Gambale.
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Well, that’s me happy! Two of my favourite players right there.
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This is a good subject for me
I love this place and am grateful for it.
But… lol
Always a butt.
I’m not sure if it is by design but I find the obviously missing piece here for me is concise tutorials
On each of the styles.
For example instead of digging through the mountains of material it would be great if there was a section called twps for example.
In that section would be drills that flow in a logical order until all the most common patterns have been covered.
Then again for cross picking etc…
I get that the material is all here but you have to dig, Catalog then practice. I would like to just click my preferred style and practice.
Possible Problem is that people would simply do this and unsub anyway so its extra work for less pay.
However people may take the course to get on their feet and move on to digging through the interviews to steal some licks.
I feel at this point I understand twps from digging and then creating my own drills but if a person was just a tad dumber than me it could be that they would just move on.
I only say this because I honestly feel this site is the most important guitar related thing to come along as far as picking goes and you guys deserve to do well and new people should get the very best from the start of their journey.
I feel concise tutorials would be amazing.
Unless it somehow made it so the site could not do well as a business.
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Ps.
With pick stroke notation and options
Maybe require a membership and sell each portion of the lesson for 5 bucks or whatever makes it work
Perhaps if the various interviews and features had search functions tags with the various mechanical styles covered in the interview to make them easier for people to reference? For example you could tag the interviews featuring players who primarily demonstrate #USX or #TWPS or #wristdeviation or something? Maybe using multiple tags as needed. Might make it easier for newbies to navigate and find stuff that’s suited to their goals.
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Without wanting to talk myself into a job, that seems like it could be something the community here could contribute to.
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One of the things that took a while for me to figure out is that I like to start ascending on an upstroke.
Also at first I would change my pickslant when needed then almost immediately correct over the course of a note or three.
Now I’m changing then staying with it until a change is forced. Except is certain situations. So there is a certain amount of self discovery that is required.
But if each lesson was presented with different stroke options I think people would make these discoveries faster. Just my opinion for sure
It might be as simple as creating simple to complex runs that would be used in every style then just map out the various picking options a dwps or twps picker would use. I’m in over my head now. It’s simple but to really do it well it would take some serious thought.
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Yeah absolutely! This is a big thing we want to add to the Pickslanting Primer, clear and concise tutorial chapters covering the fundamentals of various techniques in a way that’s hands on and makes it clear how everything works.
We’re starting with updates on picks and grip, but plan to do the same for motions / picking styles and probably some other things as well.
Related to the above, this is also a great idea! Something we have considered and could definitely make things easier to find. We’ll have to think about the best way to do this and if we could incorporate community tag suggestions somehow 
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I’d still like to see the Brendon Small one some day
Just my personal taste of course but his music is more my kind of thing than some of the other recent interviews so I was looking forward to it.
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Has the Cracking the Code team considered bringing on an intern or something for animations and other work? I’m sure there are tons of students in the NYC area who would jump at such an opportunity.
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I’m with you! Definitely also still on our to do list.
Yes, we have actually done this in the past, part of a program with one of the local colleges here. It worked pretty well but we’ve realized that’s our main bottleneck isn’t usually things we could easily assign an intern. Most often when it comes to getting new stuff out, “only one Troy” is the limiting factor!
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Yeah I’d imagine there’d be a pretty steep learning curve to learning virtuoso guitar playing over the course of a semester lol
This is for sure, the hardest thing about the material presented. It’s so complete that it can become harder to make it actionable.
One must imagine that there are users of the material who are very new, and can benefit from every. single. nugget. and in the grand scheme, it is most crucial to have all that content… but then I would bet that the average user of the content is a pretty technically advanced student, especially by modern criteria, since this sort of technical playing is not currently at a popularity forefront. Like… I would bet donuts that every single person reading this forum is “the most technically advanced guitarist within a 5 mile radius” or something similar silly.
When adopting a totally new technique, or just laser focusing on a new approach to a very old technique (as in pickslanting) it would be monumentally useful to have a distilled PDF or even a cut up video, nailing the salient points. And this would be a slightly painful thing for the team, I imagine, because of the obvious huge amount of work put into presentations and interviews.
But it WOULD be massively useful. We’d all use it. We’d probably all watch all of the content, and then specifically hammer away at the distilled document or video.
Either way, I’m glad all this stuff exists. Hits so many of the little glitch points we all have… so useful.
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“Think this at your peril” has been the experience of my life, whatever stage I’ve reached on the guitar at the time in question.
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That was intended to be silly. I do not believe in ANY competition in the arts. I can see how that might have been taken in a different way.
I guess I’m trying to imply that such depth of technical focus is currently very much OFF TREND and uncommon, and should be embraced and appreciated by fans of people going above and beyond.
I think we should cheer on the obsessives, whether they be “I can’t release an album until I can nail all the Bach Inventions” or “I need to get Coltrane Changes up to 260bpm” because it’s people who are putting their butts on the line.
Certainly the SMARTER thing to do would be to just play top 40, have FUN gigs and get paid… but we’ve all stared into the void. Once you know what Shawn or Allan did for example… you know you are only “done” when you say “I don’t want to deal with this anymore.”
As it pertains to the comment I was replying to, I think a beautifully made 20 minute video could be condensed for hypernerds down to 5 minutes, and allow folks to get down to the gnashing of teeth. I don’t actually think that’s an appropriate idea for how this us run as an enterprise, and I don’t want to offer “you should do it like this instead,” ideas, because I understand the incredible attention to detail and the time consuming nature of things like this content creation. I just agree with a few others that “I would love to watch a video once, and then chew on the 7 things in that video that I suck at” etc.
Have an awesome rest of your weekend!
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