Masking??? (Noob)

[philsmd]

looks almost perfect, but @undeath I think the first step is not quite correct.

#1: "either all cap or no cap"

this means that you have only 2 possibilities (either 3 lowercase or 3 uppercase characters).

therefore I would put this two passwords/variants into a dict file and combine that with the second dict
i.e.
part1.txt:

Code:

ABC
abc

part2.txt:

Code:

abcdef
ghijkl
mnopqr

Code:

hashcat --stdout -a1 part1.txt part2.txt -o part1_2.txt

furthermore, the command in step 6 seems incorrect:
you need to specify the hash file before the dicts ,i.e.

Code:

hashcat -a1 -m [attack mode] [hash file] part1_2_3.txt part4.txt

The other suggestions look very good.

btw: for fast hashing algorithms and with larger keyspace etc you might consider using different attack types (like rule based attacks etc), but since it's truecrypt/veracrypt (a very slow hash algo) the attack mode and how you provide the password candidates (input) doesn't really matter at all (it should be correct of course )