Let's examine a couple of stills from the slant picking primer:
First of all, you'll notice that he lets his index finger point toward the strings and he's playing with mostly fingerprint rather than resting the plectrum on the side of the index finger. It's not an extreme case but it's nonetheless weak.
This grip would be fine if he had a "hitchhiker's thumb" (thumb hyper-mobility) like Benson or Reid, etc., but he'd be picking with a reverse angle if that was the case. The main problem to note here is that his grip and his thumb physiology are working against one another.
For the majority of players lacking thumb hyper-mobility, this "fluffer" grip is a problem. You will find this with a lot of self-taught types who never cracked open any method book from the last 100 years for basic picking instructions. Of course, if you prefer just watching slow motion technique porn over actually playing your own guitar, carry on in blissful ignorance!
This grip is okay for sweep picking and slurring everything with your fretting hand (or just plinking on quarter notes) but using it for everything else, e.g., alternate picking, this grip is counterproductive and, if left uncorrected, will require some additional bad habits (a.k.a., The Code) to get anywhere.
Beyond the weak grip, he gets the pick stuck way down between the strings, and I mean way, way down in between the strings. In the slanting primer what you see below is described as "representative" of the amount of pick that is to be sacrificed to the spirit of inefficiency.
We have now combined a weak grip with excess pick excursion.
To solve this double whammy we're going to introduce a third, unnecessary element: laying the pick on its side then slouching over the hill into another ravine that we'll have to climb out of over and over and over.
We now have a car sporting square wheels.
This grip is okay for sweep picking and slurring everything with your fretting hand (or just plinking on quarter notes) but using it for everything else, e.g., alternate picking, this grip is counterproductive and, if left uncorrected, will require some additional bad habits (a.k.a., The Code) to get anywhere.
Beyond the weak grip, he gets the pick stuck way down between the strings, and I mean way, way down in between the strings. In the slanting primer what you see below is described as "representative" of the amount of pick that is to be sacrificed to the spirit of inefficiency.
We have now combined a weak grip with excess pick excursion.
To solve this double whammy we're going to introduce a third, unnecessary element: laying the pick on its side then slouching over the hill into another ravine that we'll have to climb out of over and over and over.
We now have a car sporting square wheels.
Here's your Code:
1. The fluffer plectrum grip (the actual root of the problem);
2. Excessive pick excursion;
3. Non-linear attack producing linear results (the opposite of what we strive for).
Is this a bit exaggerated for demonstration purposes? Perhaps, but technical extremes often reveal fundamental flaws baked into the very foundation of a given approach.
Troy's sound in his 'slanting primer' video is actually good, his schtick TV is entertaining, he's got a great hook to lure in ham-fisted beginners and frustrated intermediates, and he's a legit 80s shredder sub-clone (can't have too many of those) but this 'solution' could have been avoided from the beginning by properly gripping the plectrum and just staying on top of the strings. But that would have required having studied the first 10 pages of any standard method book published in the last 100 years.
1. The fluffer plectrum grip (the actual root of the problem);
2. Excessive pick excursion;
3. Non-linear attack producing linear results (the opposite of what we strive for).
Is this a bit exaggerated for demonstration purposes? Perhaps, but technical extremes often reveal fundamental flaws baked into the very foundation of a given approach.
Troy's sound in his 'slanting primer' video is actually good, his schtick TV is entertaining, he's got a great hook to lure in ham-fisted beginners and frustrated intermediates, and he's a legit 80s shredder sub-clone (can't have too many of those) but this 'solution' could have been avoided from the beginning by properly gripping the plectrum and just staying on top of the strings. But that would have required having studied the first 10 pages of any standard method book published in the last 100 years.
In the 80s a lot of kids abandoned lessons and method books in favor of Hot Licks and guitar magazines. The result was that a lot of people never learned basic technique. Watching EVH and YJM on MTV led to a lot of imitation (lots of sweeping, slurring, tapping, thin strings, hot pickups, distortion on top of distortion, etc.). That's fine but once you try to do anything else you discover you've dug yourself a pretty deep hole.
Is Troy Grady a bad player? No, of course not. He's okay. He has a lot of bad habits built into his 'code' (the code really is just a collection of bad habits) but a lot of good players have bad habits. What I am saying is that he might have been twice as good in half the time. But we'll never know. He'll never know.
Once you've crawled this far up Yngwie's ass you don't need a code to crack you just need to extricate yourself from the hole you found yourself in. If you keep going you won't pop out the other end you'll just be stuck watching guitar technique porn in some dude's Patreon dungeon.
Is Troy Grady a bad player? No, of course not. He's okay. He has a lot of bad habits built into his 'code' (the code really is just a collection of bad habits) but a lot of good players have bad habits. What I am saying is that he might have been twice as good in half the time. But we'll never know. He'll never know.
Once you've crawled this far up Yngwie's ass you don't need a code to crack you just need to extricate yourself from the hole you found yourself in. If you keep going you won't pop out the other end you'll just be stuck watching guitar technique porn in some dude's Patreon dungeon.
At the philosophical level, Grady has done what a lot of people have done when they fall into hero worship: the conflate an idiosyncratic particularity into an abstract universal -- it's a sub species of epistemic trespassing. More than the man himself, the army of CrackBots have turned a fringe glitch in the history of guitar technique into a universal panacea.
How does one avoid all of this mumbo jumbo?
With a proper transverse plectrum grip (the traditional grip) and a little practice you'll find that all these problems just take care of themselves. For over 100 years players not mesmerized by YJM or EVH have had no problem picking their guitars -- and they were the inventors of sweeping and tapping long before YJM and EVH turned those techniques into worn out gimmicks. Yes, kids, what you call "sweep picking" was just "gliding" 100 years ago.
Troy also has some other issues on top of problems 1, 2, and 3:
4. Excessive anchoring on the bridge (which is fine in some contexts, however, there are more elegant ways to mute strings while staying in the fast lane);
5. He adheres to a one-dimensional / homogenous approach to the string plane as if there is no radius involved;
6. Sometimes he doesn't know what he's talking about, for example, calling hammer-ons and pull-offs "legato." It's a common problem with guitarists. Legato (the opposite of staccato) has to do with the "full value" of notes. Legato is not actually a 'technique' outside of guitar magazines and YouTube videos.
This entire technical approach is regressive and represents neither the leading edge of guitar technique nor adherence to 100 years of proven guitar tradition. It's just a bunch of nonsense turned into a system for people drawn to gurus and hucksters. Hey, it's the age of grift, after all.
Every now and then a kid comes along who can't pick his guitar properly and their gimmick represents a fabulous development such as EVH's two-handed tapping. While he didn't invent tapping he certainly popularized it. But for every EVH (a one-in-a-million kind of player) there's 999,999 kids who just can't pick and their solution is no solution at all. They just pay some guy to produce endless TV episodes for them to watch.
You can still have all your gimmicks with proper mechanics. Hell, even Frank Gambale with all his ridiculous S\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\EEPING runs knows how to grip a plectrum properly -- and he's an excellent alternate picker.
But I don't think any of the 'slant picking' stuff is even about technique in the same way that McDonalds isn't even about hamburgers.
I watched Grady's Steve Morse video and what struck me most profoundly was how everything is jammed into new jargon boxes that corresponds to Grady's "discoveries." The irony, of course, is that Grady has discovered literally nothing but if you know nothing about the history of plectrum technique you can just claim that everything that came before was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and repackaged in new McShred colors. In philosophy this is called "Presentism" and in the social sciences it's called "Alienation" -- Grady and his CrackBots don't know what they don't know (completely ignorant about everything outside their hologram) so everything can be ginned up as new and exciting. My god, I can show you method books from 60 years ago where students are shown how to "slant" their picks because "slanting" was already baked into the traditional grip.
Franz Borkenau once said where there are two people doing the same thing, it's not the same thing. Well, this is not the case in the land of McShred where everything collapses down into one of the prepackaged jargon boxes, that, like transcendental Platonic forms, have apparently existed since the dawn of time. It was always there to begin with! Every great player for the last six generations was always, already part of the franchise.
I think the Chief Cracker is a better pitchman than he is a guitarist and I think he's got a pretty good sense of his clientele's technical proficiency when they show up at his site and just how far they're willing to take practice and hard work -- hey, who's got 8 hours a day to dedicate to practice, right? It's not like the fate of your eternal soul depends on it.
Slanting is the new name for enthusiastic ignorance, underdeveloped technical proficiency, and bad habits so it makes sense from a marketing standpoint to create a product that offers a way for players to continue doing what they're already doing. Why do it right if you can just keep doing it while paying someone to stroke your mullet?
Look, 99% of guitar owners will never do anything with their guitar (90% abandon it within the first year) and they feel lost and fear wasting time: I only have 20 minutes a night to mess around on this thing, am I doing it right, or what? Sure, you're on the right track (whatever it is, it doesn't even matter) and we're here to elongate your journey down that well-worn path from ownership, frustration, confusion, progress, plateau, apathy, and finally, Facebook Marketplace.
Slanting is the swindle phase (the essential oils moment) between plateau and apathy.
If you're watching guitar technique videos rather than putting in 20+ hours per week actually playing, I doubt you'll even be playing in another year. But that won't prevent you from evangelizing the marvels of slant picking on Facebook or wherever they teach kids to ride bikes with square wheels.
You can still have all your gimmicks with proper mechanics. Hell, even Frank Gambale with all his ridiculous S\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\EEPING runs knows how to grip a plectrum properly -- and he's an excellent alternate picker.
But I don't think any of the 'slant picking' stuff is even about technique in the same way that McDonalds isn't even about hamburgers.
I watched Grady's Steve Morse video and what struck me most profoundly was how everything is jammed into new jargon boxes that corresponds to Grady's "discoveries." The irony, of course, is that Grady has discovered literally nothing but if you know nothing about the history of plectrum technique you can just claim that everything that came before was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and repackaged in new McShred colors. In philosophy this is called "Presentism" and in the social sciences it's called "Alienation" -- Grady and his CrackBots don't know what they don't know (completely ignorant about everything outside their hologram) so everything can be ginned up as new and exciting. My god, I can show you method books from 60 years ago where students are shown how to "slant" their picks because "slanting" was already baked into the traditional grip.
Franz Borkenau once said where there are two people doing the same thing, it's not the same thing. Well, this is not the case in the land of McShred where everything collapses down into one of the prepackaged jargon boxes, that, like transcendental Platonic forms, have apparently existed since the dawn of time. It was always there to begin with! Every great player for the last six generations was always, already part of the franchise.
I think the Chief Cracker is a better pitchman than he is a guitarist and I think he's got a pretty good sense of his clientele's technical proficiency when they show up at his site and just how far they're willing to take practice and hard work -- hey, who's got 8 hours a day to dedicate to practice, right? It's not like the fate of your eternal soul depends on it.
Slanting is the new name for enthusiastic ignorance, underdeveloped technical proficiency, and bad habits so it makes sense from a marketing standpoint to create a product that offers a way for players to continue doing what they're already doing. Why do it right if you can just keep doing it while paying someone to stroke your mullet?
Look, 99% of guitar owners will never do anything with their guitar (90% abandon it within the first year) and they feel lost and fear wasting time: I only have 20 minutes a night to mess around on this thing, am I doing it right, or what? Sure, you're on the right track (whatever it is, it doesn't even matter) and we're here to elongate your journey down that well-worn path from ownership, frustration, confusion, progress, plateau, apathy, and finally, Facebook Marketplace.
Slanting is the swindle phase (the essential oils moment) between plateau and apathy.
If you're watching guitar technique videos rather than putting in 20+ hours per week actually playing, I doubt you'll even be playing in another year. But that won't prevent you from evangelizing the marvels of slant picking on Facebook or wherever they teach kids to ride bikes with square wheels.
