nah, ye cannae only listen te the lock, ye have to visualize it's guts. use the back of the hook and gently rake the pins out and unset them before attempting anything, this allows ye to hear them, and feel them with your brain. then, also, make sure you aren't putting too much pressure on the barrel with your tension tool, those pins are very small, similar to the size of little flints from theose old fashion lighters... ahh.
zipoo er something, zippo lighters?? I CLEARLY HAVE NO IDEA WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT, EVER..
Some lock manufacturers think they are sexy and shape the little pins like bullets, kind of tapered at the top so you feel as if you set them but you really don;t that's why you can't rely only on listening to them. Also you dont want to practice with a door knob ye bought at a store, because the angles of the situation will be so weird by the time you go to the door to do it, - it will be like you never practiced at all. I say sit in an airconditioned room, put a lockable door handle on your door, and practice on it, over and over and over again until ye can pick it super fast. success of the pick is proportional to the sum of patience and time which in turn have their own scale. if you dont have a lot of time, you need more patience.
The long pick you have in the picture next to the keys.. the top tip would be very useful for "raking" locks, but it makes a shit load of noise when you do so. The bottom tip would be nice for "singular raking" when you see in my old lock pick videos of me moving my hands up and down up and down.. thats what i was doing, you can rake singular pins by doing this until you feel a small amount of torque give way.
buy some of those things grocery stores use for carving up pumpkins that look like little saws, you can easily trim them, they arent brittle and can be used for "bumping" which is an awesome exploit of locks, it's like the distribution of energy from your arm goes into one pin and then applies the rest to the next pin... until they are set.
also if you are seriously interested in doing this and your hand cramps up that fast, i suggest buying one of those little "V" shaped hand exercisers that hair metal band members use to strengthen their hands to play faster scales. - that would be very useful.
when "singular raking," like when you are picking door knobs its okay to let up on the tension tool every now and then, they are very easy locks to pick most of the time, and if you have a jammed pin it will unset giving you a better chance of getting it right. The pins have to go up in order.
read up on it a lot too, theres tons of videos online and the MIT guide to lock picking is free as a PDF. maybe google - lockpicking+pdf - to find a bunch of manuals or whatever people have written.
lock picking is a good hobby, and if you need more help pm me, i have been doing it a long time - trev.
i mean, i am like a senior citizen by now. :p
