Just curious if people here like this book. The Amazon reviews are really positive.
My old guitar teacher built his technique in part off that and Rock Discipline and he is a great player. It’s a classic IMO. It couldn’t hurt to pick it up but it is pretty exercise heavy.
I have a love/hate relationship with that book. It has some great “what to practice” suggestions, and some concepts that are good. And for someone who understands the ideas CTC has covered and can read Stetina’s book with a critical eye, I think you can pull some great stuff out of it. But I think for someone without CTC background, Stetina’s book could potentially be counterproductive inasmuch as following Stetina’s suggestions in the absence of CTC insight could for some people result in the reinforcement of counterproductive habits.
There’s one section in Stetina’s book that has a collection of string crossing exercises, and he suggests working on each one, and gives the sensible advice of measuring your progress and allocating more time to the ones that you identify as “problem areas” for yourself. Though they aren’t distinguished by Stetina, the collection includes some examples that in the post-CTC world we recognize as “2-way pickslanting”, or “occasional double-escaped” or whatever term we’re using now to refer to something that’s mostly single-escaped, but has some double-escapes sprinkled in. So those exercises from Stetina do present an opportunity for a subset of players to stumble into their own solutions for 2-way pickslanting, but they don’t actually prescribe a solution for those of us who fail to intuit our own way into 2-way pickslanting.
There’s also some potentially harmful repetition of some of the popular advice that CTC has caused us to re-evaulate: e.g. importance of small motions, neutral pickslant (may be useful for people trying to develop 2-way pickslanting, but might impede progress in getting over the hump with 1-way/single-escaped licks), emphasis on slow “perfect” repetitions in the absence of a valid reference point for what “perfect” reps will actually look and feel like at speed.
With those caveats aside, if you read Stetina’s book with CTC goggles on, I think you could pull a lot of good things out of it.
And I think Stetina’s more basic “Metal Rhythm Guitar 1&2” and “Metal Lead Guitar 1&2” books are probably the best introductory rock guitar books around.
5 Likes
The number one most important idea I got from Rock Discipline was the idea of sometimes treating your picking hand like a “motor” running at a certain speed when you do fast-picked stuff, rather than always thinking in terms of discrete pickstrokes (though there are times when that is the right approach too).
2 Likes
Check out :
Complete technique for modern guitar
By Joseph Alexander.
Phenomenal book that is really helping my LH finger independence
Aldo Guitar Scales in context by the same author
Fundamental Changes has some great titles, especially the books by Chris Brooks which mirror Troy material. …
All on Amazon
When I started learning guitar nearly 20 years ago this was the book I had. Seen from a historical perspective (the book came out in 1990) it actually does a fair job of explaining right hand technique. The following quote is taken from the opening notes to the 2nd chapter - The Right Hand.
“…the angle that you hold your pick to the strings is important. If the pick leans too far either way (top of the pick towards the ceiling or the floor), it will put one motion of crossing the strings at an advantage and the opposite motion at a disadvantage. For alternate picking, keep the pick almost perpendicular to the strings.”
This shows that Stetina in fact did have some understanding of the pick-slanting concept, although those few lines doesn’t exactly suggest the the immense importance of it to the reader.
3 Likes
Taking it a step further, we see that he wasn’t quite able to put the two ideas together in terms of alternate picking, i.e., it’s a product of two distinct motions allowing clearing of the strings.
That is true. But I guess that applies to more or less everyone prior to Troy Grady?
1 Like
The book is largely a product of its time. I can’t fault Troy Stetina for his lack of knowledge. Yeah, it’s a collection of exercises, but as a jumping off point it has served many people very well.
FWIW there are many examples of people alluding to string crossing difficulties on forums and instructional materials, Eric Johnson being the most famous. Troy (Grady) was the first to present it in a holistic way. Hence Cracking the Code, and not Presenting the Breadcrumbs.
2 Likes
There are many things about the Stetina book that I like, but the specific passage you picked out here, I’d argue is mostly harmful because it seems to insinuate that it is desireable to play with a picking motion that is parallel to the plane of the strings, trapped on both upstrokes and downstrokes. This is nearly the antithesis of the single-escaped approach that guys like Yngwie and EJ and countless others use wildly successfully. For double-escaped stuff in the Andy Wood vein, you could maybe argue that Stetina’s advice about pick orientation here could be a good starting point, but because single-escaped picking is sooooo much easier, the fact that Stetina doesn’t acknowledge it as a useful building block strongly implies that he’s advocating the kind of “use a neutral slant and you’ll be able to pick anything as long as you practice enough” that was so widespread (and mostly ineffective) for the last 20 or 30 years.
What I take from what Stetina was saying there is that the pick should be neutral relative to the trajectory of the picking motion (keeping string resistance the same when you cross in either direction), but he disregards the question of what the picking trajectory might be relative to the plane of the strings, or worse, sort of implies that a picking trajectory parallel to the plane of the strings is the best way to start out (as I said above, sort of true for the Andy Wood double-escaped style, but a very tough row to hoe).
In the metal shred world that Stetina marketed to, even Michael Angelo Batio, arguably the poster child for double-escaped picking in metal, generally doesn’t do double-escaped picking full time: he does single-escaped picking and sprinkles in double-escaped picking only where he needs it to solve a string-crossing problem (even though he worked these things out intuitively rather than deconstructing the double-escaped and single-escaped concepts explicitly).
In Stetina’s string crossing exercises, which I’d argue are the best part of the book, Stetina acknowledges that some will come more easily than others, but doesn’t discuss why or supply pick trajectory strategies for solving them. I agree that Stetina’s book is a product of its time, and even today is still valuable in many ways, but I believe your interpretation of the passage you quoted implies Stetina appreciated the string-crossing problem at that time more deeply than he really did.
Honestly, looking at instructional material from around that time, I think MAB comes closest to teaching the concepts that CTC has narrowed in on. When you look at his early videos in hindsight, you can tell what he’s trying to say, but he never quite expresses it in a way that was digestible to a broad audience.
2 Likes
Yeah I see your point and you are probably right. It’s funny how Stetina acknowledges that angling the pick in some cases gives an advantage to crossing strings, but more or less discourages the reader from actually using this advantage.
I agree that the string crossing exercises are a great part of the book. If applying Troy Grady’s hand motion principles these are some powerful mechanics for learning the fundamental 2-way pick-slanting motions.
Another part of the book I would like to applaud is the arrangement of Bach’s Prelude in D. Not only is it a beautiful piece, but learning it was fundamental for me understanding how to keep my alternate picking consistent (down on 1 and 3 - up on 2 and 4).
And to be totally clear, I don’t want to sound like I’m dumping on Stetina in general. Overall, I like his instructional material a lot.
oh yeah the classic speed mechanics for guitar. I had the one with the cassette. Was one of my first real books besides Guitar for the Practicing Musician magazines. I learned a lot from that book and even have it for kindle these days. Although I could never get really fast with the stuff it did offer some good technique stuff and how to practice somewhat. No cracking the code insights though.