jumpinjeff
Forum Replies Created
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Perfect Question, It grabbed me and gave me pause to think! Improvisation could be one note but does not have to be….adding in harmonize notes add lovely sonic texture. I use a rake technique across 4ish strings muted, also providing texture. Those are examples of “What you do is up to you” and “If it sounds good it is good”. Specifically what happens is the rhythm of the chordal structure is maintained for 4,8,16 bars (whatever is agreed between the players) or a backing track, the Improviser then adds a melodic contribution over the chordal structure.
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Well done @drbrow and congratulations. The daily bites have me hooked as well.
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Fretboard Wizard is a guitar specific musical theory course. I found success because Tony made the complicated plain and easy to understand. Best money I spent for music knowledge by a long shot. I had always wondered why I could play all the notes in a C scale and not all the major cords to make a nice sound. Fretboard Wizard answered that question and about a thousand others I had been meaning to figure out.
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it is not the stretch it is how the stretch is done. I found exponential increase in flexibility when I learned to stretch for release not for tightening. Especially with the tiny muscles and connective tissue in the fingers and hands. Think silly putty. Stretch it too fast and it breaks: slowly and it stretches into long thin threads.
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Best all around pick for the money is Dunlop Ultex 2.0. On the exotic side….I love Snakewood as a pick material and thick 2.5. I mess around with other woods too, Amboyna, pink ivory wood, BRW. This was whittled down from ten types of wood to my faves. I like Blue Chips but not all the time. They slide on the strings almost too much and cost is a detractor. For fast strum training I worked the Jim Dunlop Nylon .60. This was a training pick, the dynamic range is narrow compared to the effort needed to produce the change. This is a loud pick: the pick itself makes sound as it strikes the string. I am not big on that sound which reinforces my use as training pick only. Great though for the purpose of working speed (another way of saying, “how much can you relax while playing”). I can see if you are having grip problems how the Primetones are useful. I used to have that issue until I figured flat picking was all about balance in the same way riding a bike was about balance. Once you get it you no longer fall off. Just know that balance is the key and you will get it. Just keep going. Lastly I have a little mother of pearl pick that I have been experimenting with for a few years. Mother of pearl is a hard material, the hardest of all of them and it is the fastest. This pick requires the most precision. It only takes the very tip of the pick to strike the string any more and it gets awkward feeling. It took me the most time to get a desired sound (precision seems to come to me exclusively through time), the rewards though are worth it. I even made picks out of turtle shell (it was road kill), not a fan. I have tried paper, various plastics including credit cards and any other material that makes a little ping sound when dropped and hits the ground. I put speed bevels on all my wood picks. Forgot to include that important developmental detail. The advantage of the wood picks is I can reduce the pick to string contact noise to almost nothing. I have been working many years to find a way to achieve this effect. Closer every day! Have fun. It is one of the least expensive ways to play around with your acoustic sound!
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I will throw in a trick that I learned from Pete Huttlinger. Play as loudly as you are able, followed by playing as softly as you are able. Go back and forth. Helped me to understand how the strings and my pick interacted.
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@albert_d : Congratulations!! You have come far! You will go further!!! You have found the key to success. Wonderful inspirations in your Q & A! Alice’s restaurant is part of my guitar origin story. I had a teacher who would play this for us an make up his version with us as characters and use the plot frame but change it so it entertained 10 year olds. My, my we had fun with that song and I became even more convinced I was going to play guitar. There were two guitars on the wall you could play anytime and there was one in a case you needed to ask permission to play. It was an exceptional year in my recollections.
Glad to be sharing space on the music road with you! Keep your stone rolling!
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Turn on this track and listen to it. Listen carefully to it. Pick up your guitar and find one note that sounds good the whole way through. Start moving off of that note in rhythmic patterns with one other note. Keep changing that new note until you find two that work well and play that for a while and so on and so on. Alternate between your First note that sounds good everywhere and the others always coming back to your first Root Note. You should tune your guitar to 435hz if you are going to use this track to learn on.
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Hi Laurajean, I like the suggestion of the bar chord, skills course: super to get to the little things that matter but hard to see at the beginning. Such as….take a moment and figure out what strings are being barred by your “Bar”. Most of us expend way to much energy pushing on, squeezing strings already covered by other fingers. Take the Bar F for example. The low E , the B and the High E. Try making the bar without fingering the chord part, just bar the Low E the B and the High E and figure out how to make those notes ring out (don’t play the other notes just the three that the bar covers.) You may find that by directing pressure with a little practice, you don’t have to wear out your hand to make a bar chord. I think Tony demonstrates this in the bar chord course…and if he doesn’t…., well,…. he should. (I think he does). : )
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Hi Ron, I wish it were a simple thing but it is really a time and effort game of muscular training that will allow you to do this. There is a “5 day Challenge” in TAC that deal directly with this. These were the most physically challenging exercises I have encountered anywhere. Critical to work these slowly, without tension (and it is going to be difficult to pull that off at first) but they also yielded the most dramatic improvement over time. The way fingers are engineered, they just don’t stretch away from each other on a spread very well on their own. You must train to fire those tiny hand/ wrist muscles in a circular pattern to get them to seemingly stretch apart on their own. This “5 day finger stretch challenge” specifically trains that. There is another skills course that is a stretching course (located under the “Basics” heading in Skills Courses but that is not what you are looking for). You want the “5 day Challenge” “finger stretch” found in the Skills Course section…..watch out for the Wednesday Challenge. It still makes my eyes water : ) These are really great fun!! “5 day” is used repeatedly. It can be confusing.
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Hey @petelanger , I think we have been hitting the benchmarks every month lately. Jan.-Aint No Sunshine, Feb.- Wagon Wheel, Mar.- Hotel Califonia, Apr.- Old Man.
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Yes! look for it in your favorites. You can play them anytime you like so you’ll never peeve.
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Why do you play guitar Moh? In getting to the bottom of that, we may get to why you don’t like guitar practice. Logically, I would say that practice delivers you from the buzz and thuds you don’t like. But art is not always logical. I remember when I first started learing here I would get super frustrated that I could not play like Tony or even remotely resembling what Tony demonstrated. It was not until I realized Tony had been through his own learning process twenty years prior and had been playing for 20+ years. Once I appreciated his learning effort and result I respected my own effort and became comfortable with the learning part of being a practitioner of guitar playing.
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Sounds good Ron, I encourage you to make this a practice. pick one. learn it by memory. do it every day, several times, short sessions. When it gets boring pick another one and do the same. When you have them all in your memory it really gets fun.
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Not lost: you are in the exact correct place. All the sign posts are in a foreign language. Keep going….it gets easier as you learn the new language.