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All five parts of our “Secrets of Gambale Sweeping” series are now online.
This is an hour-long investigation of Frank’s influential technique that we’ve been working on since last year. It’s been a lot of work and we’re excited to finally have it complete!
The series covers a lot of ground, going deep on why certain picking motions only work with certain arrangements of fretted notes, and building to a comprehensive analysis of the full system Frank uses, combining two alternate picking motions, two sweeping motions, and a healthy dose of creative genius.
It also contains some of our clearest explanations yet on important questions like the intersection of alternate picking and sweeping, and the interaction of pickslanting and picking motion.
The entire series is now on the platform for subscribers, as part of the full Frank Gambale Interview package. But we also put all five videos on YouTube, free to watch. You can find them all linked in the post above!
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Thanks Troy. Very helpful indeed.
Awesome. It’s crazy that this is a team of only four people producing all of this stuff.
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Thanks a lot for this mini-series !
I am happy that economy-picking is getting more attention 
Great Job!
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Awesome indeed!
I was just a spectator for this one, so it was only 3 people, so even crazier
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This an amazing breakdown, not only of Frank’s well-known technique but that of several other players covered in CTC. Recommended viewing for all of my intermediate to advanced students! Thanks for all of the effort put into this!
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This series has been great. One topic I don’t believe has been covered yet is how Frank’s left hand muting helps bring his technique to life. @Troy Is he doing anything unique with his left hand or is it more generic in nature?
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I don’t know what you mean by unique or generic but others have probably thought more about whatever he does than I have. I will say that he’s one of those “no flying pinky syndrome” players, a select club including Eddie Van Halen and Michael Angelo Batio. I’m not a member, so I’m stuck out here in the waiting room with EJ and Paul Gilbert and the other unruly digits players!
More generally the reason there’s nothing about fretting or musical choices is mainly because the series was about Frank’s picking technique. And even there, we had to be selective to try to stay on topic. You’ll notice there’s almost no discussion of physically what Frank does in terms of wrist, arm, and finger motions, and how you would actually try to replicate his technique. It’s not a tutorial. It’s an explainer on the concepts, like why does he use these angled picking motions, and why does the pick look (or not look) slanted, and so on. The tutorial aspects of this will probably end up in the Primer at some point just because that’s the better place for all the physical tutorial stuff.
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Thank you, @Troy. Makes sense. I was just intrigued by the note separation he achieves sometimes, like almost stacatto to my ears while sweeping like crazy.
Great series for sure 
In “Monster Licks & Speed Picking”, Frank gives a pretty detailed explanation of using the left + right hands to mute all the strings except for the target string
Basically, you use the left hand 1st finger to mute all of the strings higher than the target string AND the finger tip to mute the lower adjacent string. The right hand palm mutes the the lower strings, and moves up higher as string tracking moves higher.
Starts at bar 198: https://www.soundslice.com/slices/g4bcc/
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Excellent. Thank you!