What were your results?

Playing Technique
#1

Love watching Troy’s videos, but haven’t yet purchased a membership or individual courses. Wondering if those of you have purchased them, what was your playing level before you bought them and did they improve your technique and playing? Do I buy a year membership and try to dig into as much material as possible or are the individual courses a better deal to download once and own?

Areas I really want to focus on are cleaner tremelo picking and using more wrist than forearm when increasing BPM.

Just looking for feedback from people that have purchased courses or paid for membership. I’ve been playing for about 30+ years so not a beginner, but I know there’s still a lot to learn.

Thanks for any feedback you can give.

#2

I’m a total fanboy so BIAS ALERT from the top, but I can’t recommend it enough. I’d been playing for 25 years prior to signing up. I was a music major in college, tried the whole ‘wanna-be-pro-toruing-band’ thing for about 7 years and until my early 30’s my livelihood was teaching guitar privately. So I’ve had the instrument in my hands for 1000’s of hours.

I’m still not where I want to be, but from going through the materials in the membership and getting a critique from Troy, nearly overnight I added at least 30bpm to my top tremolo speed.

I’m still not quite doing all the picking motions correctly and that’s on me, not the product. I’m terribly dense and unintuitive and have bad sensory perception. But still, what I’ve incorporated has helped my single note playing increase pretty substantially. If playing straight 16ths, I’d top out around 160 - 170 bpm on certain patterns (due to inefficient string changes). I’m much more controlled in this range now and have better stamina.

I purchased a whole year membership mainly because I think the work they’ve done is amazing and I wanted to support it. Almost like a charitable gift to the arts :slight_smile: I was presently surprised at how much great material is in here though. In fact, I’ve heard of people regularly feeling lost because there’s SO much material here.

Anyway, I can’t recommend it highly enough. I love the site, the presentation of the material and the forum too (though that’s free of course).

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#3

Wow, thanks so much for your detailed reply! I’m in a similar place. HOURS of playing, probably practicing the wrong things and while I have progressed I’m sure there’s a way to have a better “baseline” so I don’t need to warm up for a while to get to a good place.

How do you get critique from Troy? Is that part of the membership??? That would almost be worth the price of a membership right there.

Thanks again for the reply. I will probably do the year membership and hunker down this winter since Covid canceled all my gigs for the year. :slight_smile:
Thank you

#4

You just post a video in our “technique critique” section of the forum :slight_smile: Easiest way is to upload the video on Youtube as “unlisted” (so it’s not publicly visible), and then you paste the link in its own line like this:

some text

link

more text

I’ll paste a link to filming instructions below

I’ll usually look at most critiques these days but if I feel unsure about what I’m seeing I may also ask Troy for advice - so hopefully you’ll be in safe hands :smiley:

Also don’t believe @joebegly when he says he’s bad at this and that, he can pick at 220+bpm and he’s still complaining :joy: :joy: :joy:

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#5

Lol! I’ll stop complaining when I can play 190bpm with my hands synced. It’s getting there…too much annoyance from my job right now. Plus I feel like now that I know what fast feels like I’m making some progress on USX with a different motion.

A fast tremolo is neat in that I couldn’t play that fast before you and Troy suggested I go all in with elbow…just unusable for my purposes till I can sync that motion to actual music. I appreciate the encouragement though!

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#6

DISCLAIMER: Another hopelessly biased CtC fanboy here too!

Thanks to CtC I discovered that I was using a single escape motion where the downstrokes escape but was trying to play lines that are much better suited to an upwards escape motion. That was a huge revelation to me as I’d spent 10+ years with little improvement due to this mismatch. I just couldn’t believe that a lot of this information was there just hiding in plain sight (e.g. 80s instructional videos etc) just waiting to be decoded by some clever person. Since then I’ve been working on an upwards escape motion so I can play the lines I want to play. It’s taking a while to completely integrate this change but I’m making excellent progress.

From time to time I revisit sections of the pickslanting primer, volcano and cascade to get a better understanding of what I’m trying to do.

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#7

Hey Tim,

I’ve been teaching guitar for a living for the past 15 years or so, playing for 23, and generally pretty diligent about practice and improving. My “chops” were pretty good before I knew about CTC stuff, but there were a lot of things that stumped me, equally in not being able to play these things and also not knowing why I couldn’t play these things. And also not being quite able to help my students as much as I would have liked.

I think I got really into all Troy’s stuff right when he started coming out with Youtube videos, and I found a lot of it helpful right away, and I think I became a paying member early on. I really can’t say enough about how much Troy’s work has opened up my own picking abilities, as well as my understanding of what’s going on with the pick and ability to teach more complex/advanced principles with picking. Plain and simple, I can just do way, way, way more than I could do before.

I do think the paid membership is very much worth it, as I think a lot of the free Youtube things are intended more to be like quick demonstrations of an idea, and the instructions and explanations with the membership material are very thorough.

I think Troy’s material is more about showing principles and systems and then the student/player has the choice of what they want to do with this stuff, how far they want to go with it, which things they want to focus on more. It’s a lot like widely expanding a problem solving toolkit.

Since it’s principle based I think the people who benefit from this stuff are willing to dig into things like details of movement, angles of the pick, get analytical and make observations, etc. I think the material is probably the least suited for people who think the simplest solution is always the correct one, or want to hold on tight to things like “well so and so didn’t know about that, and he played great, so why do I need to bother?” if there’s that kind of resistance to new ways of approaching things, it would probably be hard to get the full value of what you’re working with.

Obviously you’re not going to get many responses from people who REALLY DISLIKE the material on a forum for people who like the material. I actually appreciate the approach so much that I’ve kept my membership going for long stretches even when I’m not logging in at all or even working on picking at all, just because I want to support the work, and also just have access whenever I get curious again.

I think if you wanted to get a larger sample size in making your decision, maybe it would be useful to ask in other forums or facebook groups about people’s experience with the material and see what resonates, as the odds of hearing about negative experiences would probably be pretty low here on this site.

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#8

Thanks Jake,

I’m sold. Gonna sign up for a year and see where it takes me. I unpaid videos alone are really helpful, but I’m hoping the subscription will answer some more questions and get me over some hurdles.

Thanks for the reply. Much appreciated.

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#9

Forgot to mention: my main result has been becoming a member of the Cracking the Code team.

I may have oversold my abilities but please don’t tell Troy :smiley:

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