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I'm a Brooklyn-based guitarist, rock documentary filmmaker, and executive recruiter. My documentary project, Cracking the Code: The Secrets of Shred Guitar, utilizes high-speed video to unravel the mysteries of virtuoso guitar technique. The film features interviews with Steve Morse, Frank Gambale, Albert Lee, Michael Angelo Batio, Tommy Emmanuel, Rusty Cooley, Joe Stump, Stephane Wrembel, and many other fretboard masters. Cracking the Code has been featured in Newsweek, and profiled at MTV.com, VH-1.com, and a host of guitar-related web sites. Most recently, Cracking the Code made the cover of Premier Guitar magazine. Read more about the Code below.

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My personal web site, troygrady.com, serves as a forum for a variety of creative, instructional, video, and audio projects. Check out the latest update, entitled Amp Shopping. It's an in-depth, 40-minute shootout and review of eight boutique amps at New York's noted Ultrasound studios. Here's a clip of the Cornford Hellcat segment of the piece:

Demoing the Cornford Hellcat

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Despite fifty years of rock guitar and nearly eighty years of jazz guitar, only a small fraction of players have ever developed truly virtuosic technique. This low percentage of guitar masters is at striking odds with other areas of music study. While almost any conservatory can produce a pianist capable of nailing Chopin's Revolutionary Etude, how many guitar students anywhere have mastered Yngwie's I'll See The Light Tonight? Or Steve Morse's Tumeni Notes? Or Django Reinhardt's Montagne Sainte Genevieve?

The reason is that guitar mechanics are not well understood. The cause is the anecdotal, unstandardized, and largely unscientific nature of guitar instruction. Ask ten accomplished shredders, jazzers, or bluegrassers how they hold their picks, and you'll get at least ten answers. What's been missing is an objective investigation of what constitutes efficient guitar playing, and how celebrated masters actually achieve it.

Missing that is, until now.

Introducing Cracking the Code, a documentary of shred technique. Cracking the Code is not simply a compendium of performance footage. Nor is it a collection of licks demonstrated by masters. It is a unique mechanical investigation that uses slow-motion video to answer the question of how shred technique actually works. The principal tool in this investigation is the ShredCam, a guitar-mounted, high-speed camera that lets us perform up-close analysis of technique. The ShredCam captures hand movements at frame rates several times that of standard broadcast video, and the ShredCam software slows the footage down for further scrutiny.

Remember those movies in science class of bullets shattering apples in slow motion? Or droplets exploding into unusual coronas as they pierce the surface tension of a glass of milk? ShredCam footage is similarly revealing. It turns out that there's a good reason master shredders don't often agree on what constitutes correct technique: they're not aware they're using it. Like professional athletes, virtuoso guitarists develop subtle habits over the course of their formative practice years which are the prime enablers of their extraordinary ability. These hand and finger motions are executed only semi-consciously, frequently at speeds invisible to the naked eye. Yet they form the core of all successful shred techniques, and they are the principal reason why certain guitarists can seemingly play almost any line rapidly and cleanly. This is also the reason why so-called "average" players have difficulty replicating the performances of virtuosos, even after years of practice.

In other words: There's a trick to it. A bunch of them. The guitar was designed to be picked with your fingers, not a little plastic wedge. The difficulties this creates are significant, and shred masters instinctively employ a range of methods to overcome them. Some of these methods, like sweep picking, have become mainstream. Others have never been noted or explained before now. Cracking the Code will describe how they work.

Cracking the Code is still in production, and there is much more yet to come. There will likely be numerous additions to both the cast and structure as work progresses. If you'd like to receive emails with movie updates, sign up for the mailing list. Your address will not be used for any purpose beyond sending update notifications from troygrady.com, and you can unsubscribe at any time via a link in the messages you receive.