Featured Lesson
Economy Of Motion
Today's lesson is going to be quick
and dirty, right here. The lesson is about economy of motion. Now as we
all know, this is one of the key elements of fluid, accurate guitar
playing. You want to make your hand and finger movements of both hands
as small as possible, conserving the energy and using it for speed.
Remember the distance, speed and time relationship we learned about in
school!!
Now this lesson is very simple, and I think many of you will find it
quite effective once you have spent some time mastering it. The concept
is simple, and it applies to the picking hand.
You are going to use the smallest possible movements of the pick to play
your downstrokes and upstrokes.
Use the "Single
String Speed Triplets" lesson as your musical example, and
apply the following right hand technique: Pick the first note with a
downstroke. Then, as soon as possible, bring the pick back up against
the string to mute it, ready for the upstroke. Then, pick the
upstroke and quickly bring the pick back onto the string to mute it
ready for the downstroke. Start this slowly and strive for short, even,
staccato notes. You might want to think of this as rubbing the string
with the tip of the pick.
When you are doing this correctly, you will see how small a movement of
the pick you can use to get a note. Remember though, pick hard enough to
get good tone!
Once comfortable, grab your metronome and work this up to quicker
tempos. Keep in mind though, that you would want to alter the distances
of your strokes depending on the musical situation.
That's that! Practice this for a
couple of days and see if it helps your speed on single strings. THEN
try to apply the same principle to string crossing.
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