Find that video! I’m having the same struggles as drewguitar; after many years deciding to finally get my alternate picking together, and while I understand the method a lot better both for my picking hand (where to plant/pivot, etc) and pickslanting, even after several months of practice I’m still very slow. It’s tough.
Not really, you can find a ton of Free cracking the code lessons on YouTube! You can make an informed decision after you watch them 
I’m sorry to hear you had an instructor that did such damage to you (and I have a good idea who you’re talking about). I can’t understand why, especially knowing what I do now thanks to CtC, some teachers force their hand positions and motion mechanics on their students. I think maybe because it’s how they know to do the thing, so it makes it easier to see when the student isn’t doing it correctly. Either that or they just become dogmatic about what they do, which is worse. The best teacher I ever had, Joe Stump, never got like that about anything. alternate, economy, mixed picking/legato, was all cool to him as long as you were getting the notes out and understanding the musical and fretboard concepts.
The only thing I get strict about, motion-wise, is with my young 8-9 year old beginner students I make them learn the rest-stroke USX motion (be it with wrist or rotation/wrist, however they can do it). I do this only because for some reason little kids tend to pick with a severe outward DSX, which when you’re trying to get them to learn to strum chords with downstrokes or play a power chord, is just a nightmare lol.
I think in this case, it was more dogmatic. Kind of like his way is the best way and alternate picking is inefficient wasted motion. Worst of all he was unable to describe mechanics in any sort of detail so there was a hell of a lot of trial and error just trying to figure out how the basic fundamentals worked. This is the extent of the mechanics “The pick must never stop moving” so… no rest stroke in economy picking…??? Plus I seen him contradict himself many many times leading to more confusion… sigh lol.
Ah it is what it is, I stayed a lot longer than I should have so I’m not blameless in this!
Hi drew. To the point; you may need to reconsider what your left hand is doing…and the positioning of the notes you’re trying to play. 30 years ago, the average player didn’t approach the note positions on the neck quite the same. Also their “ears” were a bit different. I think that before you can gain the fluency to use all the concepts and techniques that Dr Grady has uncovered, you need to consider the left hand architecture that is often applied over and why it works. I’m not talking music theory; although it leads to that. Rather the actual number of notes per string, the number of picks they require, and the direction you start up on and the one you wind up with at the end - or reset. A good starting point, if this sounds confusing, is Frank Gambles “speed picking” vids which are about 30 years old or so.
He was one of the first guys that was addressing this on videos that I’m aware of back then and his emphasis was on what the left hand was doing as I recall. You’ll need to do the simple triplet work before you can get into the string skipping, arpeggios, and more melodic stuff. This gain from the right hand can help expand your schematic for how you group relevant notes and your Musicality. It is a tool toward that end.
IMHO. Good luck and never Despair; theirs always more there.
Ken
Thanks for your input Kenellis! This is not really my problem thought, quite the opposite. All those things you have described i have worked a lot on and have a good grasp on. For me the missing piece of the puzzle is efficient picking motion. Not saying i know everything else but i know how to improve further in that area if i want to and that’s not the case when it comes to picking technique.
I think this is absolutely right and this is also a hint, how this whole “start slow and gradually get faster” thing started.
Electric guitar (of course, like other instruments, too) is a thing you start in your youth, around ten, especially if you start to listen to rock music. You mess around, especially in times when information about guitar and teachers are not as accsessible as today, like in the 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s - the times electric guitar got widley established and became one of the most popular instruments among young people anyway. And probably one develops his fast techniques in the beginning in a rough manner, like you outlined, @BlackInMind. Slow practice? That’s for the adults…like parents… so to say 
(I imagine a 13 year old boy 1985, imitating Mick Mars in front of a mirror with a cheap Ibanez… or a 15 year old playing along to a Venom record, trying to look evil and to get over a break-up… good start for tremolo picking)
Later then you slow down to clean up, but you keep what you’ve experienced and probably ingrained. I think that’s how the original speed pickers made it.
BUT many well known players and also teachers tell you to start slow, for example prominently Al di Meola - a wonderful player of course! Why? I suppose masters like him relate to the fast playing that has to be clean! They probably remember how they cleaned up their fast playing by slowing down and maybe it felt for them like starting all over again. The first but for motorlearning important step to go fast and wild like a punk rebel is something that for them belongs to times without the seriousness of their playing.
So either they (subconsciously) take that step of trial and error speeding up for granted or they believe it to be unnecessary because of the cleanliness priority or they simply don’t remember how they started the real first time. In addition, through his access to publishing media - books and videos - or being a teacher in new kinds of music colleges like GIT (founded 1977) such a virtuoso speed picker along others can so to speak institutionalize that kind of teaching, which is not bad at all! It is good for syncing up, for learning phrases and scales and so on. But in the name of seriousness it seems most important for many teachers. And that can probably become an obstacle… like skipping a natural play instinct in favor of a more rational and serious (“adult”) approach. Hey after all we play guitar like we are playing a game… who started Tekken by learning all the combos as a first step? Probably nobody while we get many things and rules of the game architecture as a whole intuitively in the first few tries.
tl:dr This was just a little essay with historical references
Edit: MAB always teaches to start with fast tremolo picking. And he says it does not matter if elbow or wrist or what not
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100% I think accomplished players (educators) don’t remember the organic process in their youth and just know what it takes to refine the accuracy (slow down).
I’ve sort of sussed out 3 types of tempos and what they are generally good for:
#1 slow practice - use for improving accuracy
#2 medium “jog” tempos - use for improving control
#3 fast “burst” tempos - use for developing speed
I think a lot of pros tend to spend most of their time in #1 and #2. I recall Stump telling Troy during his interview he still does a lot of “endurance” work. This would fall into the #2 category. It makes sense, if you already have the fundamentals for your max speeds, control and accuracy is what you’d need to maintain.
As an interesting aside, I’d always hear Joe practicing outside his lesson room at Berklee, and for a player like him, the “medium” jog speeds were around 160-180 BPM 16th notes.
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Very cool categorization! But what about a #4 in which a (new) learner just tries to freak out on speed and, let’s say, plays to a song that’s actually too fast for him but he does not care? is this covered by #3? It’s that punk mentality I described. Maybe it goes in the direction of what Troy says, too: start with speed. as long it feels smooth it’s okay to sound sloppy. adjustment over time. this is a practice I consider to go beyond bursts of speed.
It’s a thought of mine inspired by Troy, by you and @guitarenthusiast and by my own experience. I also refer to this thread:
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Ok, sorry if the post was facile. Well, then I guess that leaves you to dissemble what you’re doing
Across all the vectors and then compare to the abundant examples here-in; and then see what and how much you can accommodate your picking. A lot of interesting and rewarding discovery.
Best of luck. All good. Ken
It’s all very dependent on the student’s level, age, and goals. In my “beginner of beginner” examples (young kids) it’s simply trying to get them to play along to songs at tempo, or at least some kind of steady consistent, normal tempo (ie not take 10 seconds between each chord change). I wouldn’t even recommend any kind of the practice I described to any beginner. Really, that’s for intermediate and advanced players that can play some songs and know some chords and scales, maybe can play some easy solos or licks.
As I’ve said before, the only thing I try to instill in a beginner is USX with the rest stroke, because it helps with strumming down strokes and most basic pentatonic kind of scales and chromatic exercises. Sometimes I might have a kid tremolo just for them to see that speed is possible, not “hard to do,” and they have it in them already, so slow the fuck down and work on cleaning up now 
Now, for a more intermediate player who knows they want to develop speed with scales and lead or metal rhythm, then yes, I go to step #3 as soon as they have the scale fragments memorized. But this practice is limited to single string only until they can do that relatively quick. So basically, things like the melody of Wasted Years by Iron Maiden, or anything that stays on one string, really.