off topic! What do you think, is this baby worth a buy? I am pretty far away from Nashville, so maybe you played one out of this series? Martin D28CWB.
It is just so hard to tell anything useful about a guitar without playing it in person. I have absolutely played a 70s Yamaha that beat the pants off of a 50s D-28 that was in the room with it. Going “hunting” for the right guitar and playing as many as possible is part of the fun though!
Hey Chris, I love your rhytm explanations a lot. I also love this solo of yours. Pretty hard to do the 4 chord rhythm and the backward roll though. Still trying to get rid of tension in my right hand. I beginn to feel better with it and surprisingly the sound seems to get louder as well.
Your playing sounds good on here. You've developed a good strong technique that is allowing you to pull good (and powerful) sound out of the guitar while also playing with fluidity. For what it's worth, I thought the backward roll sounded good. But you could lean into the power of the syncopation right there, a la Norman Blake rather than trying to keep it totally clean. It might inject a bit of drama into that little moment of virtuosity that could help.
I have a few thoughts regarding the rest stroke strum on the 4 chord:
1) It is very easy for your hand and wrist to tense up when doing those Tony Rice rhythm sweeps. Try using gravity and the weight of your entire forearm and hand to help you move the pick through the strings. Gravity is your friend here.
2) You might try looping between a 1 and 4 chord where you are sweeping both chords. It's good to practice this absent-mindedly while you watch tv or do something similarly mindless. Once you are feeling more relaxed with it, bring your attention more directly to the sweep and see what you notice.
3) Sometimes I find the sweeps to be easier if the pick is flatter against the string rather than rotated. There is more resistence this way but for some reason it can help.
thank you for that great lesson. I was playing around with the different scale positions for a while now, but I never saw them out of chord positions so clearly. Your explanations helped a lot. I will try to play arpeggios through chord progressions as you suggest, because that's excactly what I am lacking of when playing faster speed in a jam session. My brain is still not able to switch fast enough.... Noodling around with the arpeggios I had an idea for a little fiddle tune in G.....
A friend of mine told me, that you had a great concert in switzerland! Keep up your efforts to teach us!!
Hi Marcus, lovely tune! I'm so glad that the lesson was useful. The more you start thinking about this stuff - triads, arpeggios, scales, open voiced triads (which we will talk about next!) the more you see that it is all made of the same stuff.
I am Markus from Germany and new to yoursite. I spent some time in Bluegrass already, loving it!!! It made me playing guitar again. I started with the fundamentals and noticed that I obviously do have some bad habbits as you explain! For an example and for your advice I recorded Soldiers Joy (Missed some of the notes) with my handycam for you.
- My left hand thumb: I can't put it on the backside of the neck while playing with open strings. In higher regions and playing closed positions I can, but not on the first three frets.... If I try it feels uncomfortable to me although I notice that I loose some of the good tone.
- Watching my video and your videos... My right hand looks kind of blocked? Stiff? If I concentrate on moving my wrist more, I get good tone but I loose speed....
Nice job here! I appreciate that you've got some of your own licks going on. To answer your questions:
- It is only important to have your thumb on the back of the neck when you move up the neck and out of open position. So for me, as soon as move up the neck to play more than a few notes my thumb will drop down and I will have a much easier time playing. Your leverage gets better, but also your reach and ability to access more notes improves drastically. In open position, however, this doesn't matter at all. You'll notice that in the intro video for this lesson my thumb is hanging over the side of the neck.
- I agree that your wrist does look very stiff. Despite that, there's a "bounce" in your sound which is good! Often a stiff looking wrist also sounds stiff. Not so here. However, I think it would worth it for you to invest some energy into exploring a more loose wrist. I'm going to reshare some advice I gave to another student here:
Try giving yourself permission to be really sloppy and then actually inhabit a caraciture of looseness in your wrist. Like, make it really loose and let your notes sound sloppy to a ridiculuous degree. You're giving yourself a free pass on cleanliness so that you can start discovering a new way to play. What you want to do is feel how loose your wrist could be. Take a mental snapshot of this and reference it whenever you're feeling tight. If you practice being loose you'll be sloppy in the short term, but as time goes on your body will figure out how to be both loose and accurate.
Hi Chris,
off topic! What do you think, is this baby worth a buy? I am pretty far away from Nashville, so maybe you played one out of this series? Martin D28CWB.
https://cartervintage.com/collections/martin-acoustics/products/martin-d-28-cwb-clarence-white-2002
It's not that I am unhappy with my Collings, but.... I am sure you understand :-)
Hi Markus,
It is just so hard to tell anything useful about a guitar without playing it in person. I have absolutely played a 70s Yamaha that beat the pants off of a 50s D-28 that was in the room with it. Going “hunting” for the right guitar and playing as many as possible is part of the fun though!
Hi Markus,
Your playing sounds good on here. You've developed a good strong technique that is allowing you to pull good (and powerful) sound out of the guitar while also playing with fluidity. For what it's worth, I thought the backward roll sounded good. But you could lean into the power of the syncopation right there, a la Norman Blake rather than trying to keep it totally clean. It might inject a bit of drama into that little moment of virtuosity that could help.
I have a few thoughts regarding the rest stroke strum on the 4 chord:
1) It is very easy for your hand and wrist to tense up when doing those Tony Rice rhythm sweeps. Try using gravity and the weight of your entire forearm and hand to help you move the pick through the strings. Gravity is your friend here.
2) You might try looping between a 1 and 4 chord where you are sweeping both chords. It's good to practice this absent-mindedly while you watch tv or do something similarly mindless. Once you are feeling more relaxed with it, bring your attention more directly to the sweep and see what you notice.
3) Sometimes I find the sweeps to be easier if the pick is flatter against the string rather than rotated. There is more resistence this way but for some reason it can help.
Hi Chris,
thank you for that great lesson. I was playing around with the different scale positions for a while now, but I never saw them out of chord positions so clearly. Your explanations helped a lot. I will try to play arpeggios through chord progressions as you suggest, because that's excactly what I am lacking of when playing faster speed in a jam session. My brain is still not able to switch fast enough.... Noodling around with the arpeggios I had an idea for a little fiddle tune in G.....
A friend of mine told me, that you had a great concert in switzerland! Keep up your efforts to teach us!!
Cheers, Markus!
Hi Marcus, lovely tune! I'm so glad that the lesson was useful. The more you start thinking about this stuff - triads, arpeggios, scales, open voiced triads (which we will talk about next!) the more you see that it is all made of the same stuff.
Cheers!
Chris
Very well done. Good timing, picking and singing.
Hello Chris,
I am Markus from Germany and new to yoursite. I spent some time in Bluegrass already, loving it!!! It made me playing guitar again. I started with the fundamentals and noticed that I obviously do have some bad habbits as you explain! For an example and for your advice I recorded Soldiers Joy (Missed some of the notes) with my handycam for you.
- My left hand thumb: I can't put it on the backside of the neck while playing with open strings. In higher regions and playing closed positions I can, but not on the first three frets.... If I try it feels uncomfortable to me although I notice that I loose some of the good tone.
- Watching my video and your videos... My right hand looks kind of blocked? Stiff? If I concentrate on moving my wrist more, I get good tone but I loose speed....
Keep up your great work!
Cheers!
Markus
Wow, that sounds really good!
Hi Markus,
Nice job here! I appreciate that you've got some of your own licks going on. To answer your questions:
- It is only important to have your thumb on the back of the neck when you move up the neck and out of open position. So for me, as soon as move up the neck to play more than a few notes my thumb will drop down and I will have a much easier time playing. Your leverage gets better, but also your reach and ability to access more notes improves drastically. In open position, however, this doesn't matter at all. You'll notice that in the intro video for this lesson my thumb is hanging over the side of the neck.
- I agree that your wrist does look very stiff. Despite that, there's a "bounce" in your sound which is good! Often a stiff looking wrist also sounds stiff. Not so here. However, I think it would worth it for you to invest some energy into exploring a more loose wrist. I'm going to reshare some advice I gave to another student here:
Try giving yourself permission to be really sloppy and then actually inhabit a caraciture of looseness in your wrist. Like, make it really loose and let your notes sound sloppy to a ridiculuous degree. You're giving yourself a free pass on cleanliness so that you can start discovering a new way to play. What you want to do is feel how loose your wrist could be. Take a mental snapshot of this and reference it whenever you're feeling tight. If you practice being loose you'll be sloppy in the short term, but as time goes on your body will figure out how to be both loose and accurate.
Keep up the good work!
Chris