I have subscribed to Masters Of Mechanics for between one and two years now and right from the beginning I was told that Rusty Cooley had been interviewed with the camera attached to his guitar neck and everything. So why is it that whenever I check the list of different interviews available on Masters Of mechanics, I never see his name? Am I somehow missing it, or possibly looking in the wrong place? Thank you!
Hey, good question! Yes, we did do an interview with Rusty, however we did this one a bit differently, originally released not as an interview but a batch of clips. It was a product we called the āRusty Cooley Code Archiveā, consisting of clips / tabs but no hour-long full interview edit as w/ those weāve done more recently.
The way we edited this, many of the clips have bits of commentary baked in, so they also donāt work quite as well as standalone musical examples as we have structured on the new site with Soundslice.
Short story is weād have to take another look at this and see if we can re-edit to get it more in line with the rest of our interviews. Either as a full interview w/ conversational structure, or just getting all the clips up on the new site by themselves if that ends up working best for this.
Either way, itās on our to do list but has been on the back burner for a while. Weāll see if we might be able to do something with this soon.
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Im dying to see the Rusty Cooley stuff too! I saw one of your youtube vids of him still had a link where you could purchase the rusty archive. Is the lesson still for sale?
Yeah, I was looking for it the other day as well and obviously didnāt see it either. Iām looking forward to itās release though in whatever format works for you guys!!
If you go to Troyās Youtube channelās āVideosā page and scroll down and reload enough times you will find 4 short clips of Rusty Cooley:
frightening stuff.
I had the impression that were more of them. Maybe some of them were taken down?
If Rusty sat down once if front of CtCās camera once, maybe heās open to doing it again. But I am sure that the CtC staff has this on their to do list. Plus, thereās enough interviews in the pipeline to get excited about.
On a side note: I am thinking about cancelling my Netflix account because I am watching too much CtC that my Netflix is almost useless 
Cheers \m/
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I believe there were actually two interviews filmed. First interview he ever did was with Rusty.
You can tell it was a while ago because of lack of Dean and facial hair! Playing is still as great as ever. Not sure what the first interview was like since Troy hadnāt got his format down at that point, but the Marshall Harrison one was very enjoyable and was done the day after.
Would love to see one, or both of these interviews if time ever allows. But I agree with @kounistou, itād be great to see another interview or live broadcast with him again at some point. Thereās a lot to learn from him.
While we wait, I reccomened his Truefire course. Itās mostly a collection of licks, but thereās some interesting arpeggio ideas and picking patterns that are pretty fun to try out!
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Yeah, someone was just asking me if Rusty swipes on his 5s and 7s? Thatās why I couldnāt remember, the interview isnāt on here. Is Rusty a swiper? I never got into his playing.
I bought the Rusty archive as soon as it came out. Can confirm, he swipes both at top speed and the more āmoderateā stuff (putting āmoderateā in quotes here to feel better about myself 
).
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I think we need to differentiate between the kind accidental contact that occurs in everyoneās
playing and the sort of systematic swiping that is used by people like Batio and Jorge Strunz. I donāt think Rusty is a systematic swiper, where he uses it specifically on certain string changes all the time, as a ātechniqueā. Itās a little more complicated than that.
Alternatively, what you will also see, is that he will often pick an even number of notes per string while fretting an odd number. So the picking āworks outā, even though it doesnāt line up strictly with what is going on in the left hand. In other words, itās not like Yngwie where you have a certain number of picked notes and then a single legato note. When Rusty does a lot of these odd number patterns, there is no specific ālegato noteā. Itās just wherever it lines up, and itās a little different every time.
You could call this āunsynchronizedā but I donāt think that adequately explains whatās going on. I think he actually can tell by feel that the picking needs to be even, and he is choosing the closest match of even numbered pickstrokes to whatever he is fretting. Itās not 100% consistent and sure you will probably see swiping here and there. But the number of times you will see an actual even number of notes, uwps-style, where the last note is a downstroke, means I think there is a sort of formula at work.
The resulting sound is somewhere between picking and legato, you may like it or not. I think itās cool. I canāt do it thatās for sure. Itās also impossible to notate in tablature. Picking six notes per string while fretting seven. Thatās what it is, transcribe it as you like!
Rusty may be coming in soon, weāre trying to set that up.
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I donāt mean to sound too confrontational here, and I havenāt looked at these clips in a while, but what would you call his descending outside string changes then? I remember seeing pretty systematic swiping here without extra pickstrokes. Thereās also an instance of him playing the PG-lick out there on the internet using what looks to me like his top-speed mechanic and the swiping seems pretty audible to me, let me see if I can find it (2:30 or so here):
Addendum: Hasnāt the sort of āaccidental contactā you mention always been referred to here as swiping before? Or are you talking about changing what we mean when we say āswiping?ā
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lol, well it seems like either way the term will seem to have a negative connotation to it. Thanks for the info. I will surely check the Rusty stuff out whenever it is put up.
The reason I asked is, I find myself acquainted with quite a few alternate pickers that design their playing around keeping the pick strokes even. But they do swipe if they get caught on a stroke that would require any rotation.
What I am calling swipers is any player that will swipe, instead of rotating, out of a trapped pick stroke anytime the situation arisesā¦ So if they are good, they of course would avoid a trapped pick stroke. I feel that there are A LOT of players like this.
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This is what I was figuring Ericā¦ I think Paul Gilbert swipes that lick in Intense Rock if Iām not mistaken. 
No confrontation taken!
What Iām describing definitely happens in his playing, and Iām pretty sure there are examples of it in the āCode Archiveā clips if you still have those. Iām not saying he does this exclusively on every clip, but I am saying it happens and it explains why his playing sometimes has a kind of legato sound to it even when he is picking continuously. Rusty was the first person we ever filmed, so Iāve seen this with every version of the camera that weāve ever built. I had no idea what I was seeing at first and it wasnāt until much later that I realized what was happening.
Note also that he has a few different techniques and what weāre describing here is his elbow hyper picking technique. What youāre calling āmoderateā mode is his more traditional (if we can call it that) two-way pickslanting technique. In that technique, he is making the motions to escape when necessary. He may have occasional string contact but itās the kind of accidental contact that happens in everyoneās playing.
And yes, Rustyās āmoderateā mode is probably fast enough for most people! I know he has hung his hat on the elbow technique, in a sense, even though it is not as traditionally accurate as his 2wps approach.
That may be the case, but again, Iām not saying this is systematic in the sense that he simply doesnāt bother escaping and hits all strings at all times, as a standardized approach, the way Jorge does. And he doesnāt even really selectively but consistently hit certain strings the way Batio does. He may do bits of those in various cases, but what he does do that none of the others players appear to do is the odd/even thing. And it happens often enough that I donāt think itās accidental.
I have some footage of him playing the PG lick, and what is actually happening is interesting and changes whether he is doing the inside or outside version of it. In one of them, I think itās the outside version, he actually does what I call ādisplacementā, which Iāve talked about a little bit here:
In other words, I think the general thing I get from his playing is that he can tell by feel that the pickstrokes need to be on certain strings to go fast and actively changes up the picking structure to accomodate that, even when it doesnāt strictly match what is going on in the left hand.
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I would resist the temptation to think this. As an example, Strunz and Farah just put out their latest album, and it contains the intro jam they played during our interview. Itās now an official tune called āButterflyās Wingā, and you can listen to the studio version of it right on their home page, here:
Thatās Jorge on lead for most of that song. Knowing what we now know about his technique, I have to say, it really is pretty amazing how damn good this sounds. Calling that a āmistakeā really overlooks the fact of how well this can actually be done if you really want to. And I donāt even completely understand how heās getting it so silent. A capella, in the room, itās more audible. But even then you wonāt hear it on every string change. And he is the most extensive user of it of anyone we have interviewed, and that includes Rusty.
More generally, again, if we really want to understand how things work out there in the world, I think itās worth making a distinction between players who have taken this concept and baked into their technique in a repeatable way, versus those players like me - and I will certainly put myself in that category - who do it occasionally as more of a mistake.
Even in the mistake category, you will have players who will bonk an open string so hard that youāll hear it from a mile away. And then there are those who will hit surrounding strings and you will never hear it or even it know it is happening without the kind of close-up footage that we film.
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As a great example of Rustyās two-way pickslanting technique, check this out:
I remember that when he played this, he didnāt think it was all that good, and said something to the effect of how come I canāt do this as fast as the other lines? I on the other hand thought it was great.
I still think this speaks volumes as to the guyās innate ability to learn complicated mechanics intuitively. Swiping or not, and Iām sure thereās some of it here, he is clearly making the ācorrectā escape motions and the line sounds great. Not too many people can play this line or for that matter even know how it should be played.
And much of his sweeping is unassailable. The arpeggio sequence at :35 of this clip is just straight up cool, in my book. I donāt have shredcam footage of it but I love the writing and it sounds clean to me. And the three-string min7 arpeggio at 1:30 is about as fast and accurate as I think sweeping can really be done:
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Now this kicks ass man. 
And finally hereās that arpeggio sequence dropped into Logic and lined up with a click:
Thatās 190bpm sextuplets, or about 285bpm sixteenths. I know this is sweeping, but this isnāt just slamming across all six strings, once, as fast as you can strum. These are repeated synchronized fretting movements. In the slow motion version of this from the clip above, you can see that the two-way pickslanting of the sweep, and the synchronization, is all on point. And it sounds like it.
Why do I care? Well I just think Rusty gets a bad rap and I know some of that boils down to creative choices and matters of taste. And trying to change anyoneās mind on that is swimming upstream. But Rusty is a legit natural when it comes to the range of mechanical abilities he has, as much as any of the players we have interviewed.
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I think this is not totally accurate. The discovery here of āunsynchronizedā picking is really just a polyrhythm in fretted notes vs. pick strokes (in this case a 7:6 polyrhythm). Keyboardists have had to contend with these tricky patterns in 2 hands for centuries, luckily they have 2 staves to work with in writing two separate rhythmic parts.
Chopin gives 6:4 and 6:5 polyrhythms in the Etude Op. 25 no. 1:
In most tab/notation software, pick strokes are defined in relation to a specific note, so youāre correct that there isnāt a practical way to notate a polyrhythm in notes / pick strokes. Hereās an inelegant solution:
The fundamental musical concept here is pretty straightforward. You could show it on paper easily, but would anybody know how to read it?
More generally, why would you do it? This is essentially, a āmistakeā, unless we decide that we like the unsynchronized sound and want to emulate its randomness intentionally. Which someone might! Iām not saying you never would. I am a product of my times, I can think only in the box I was born in. 
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Well, youāve pointed out that this is not a āmistakeā, but a systematic mechanic in Rusty and Marshall Harrisonās playing:
Apparently these dudes like the sound or feel of the mechanic enough (at a subconscious level, apparently) to use it - and the notation kind of makes more sense then a random hammer/pulloff to represent it as accurately as possible.