| Dale Grider |
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Reply with quote | #1 |
Mark,
Here is a technical question. Probably the main answer is "practice like the devil" as Doc says, but, maybe you faced this same technical hurdle earlier in your own development and can share some ideas for the rest of us as we climb the mountain.
When I pluck a pair of strings from the inside, my pick is traveling in a direction away from the next string I am going to have to pluck and that has seemed much harder than plucking across two adjacent strings from the outside of the pair.
When I play from the outside of a pair of strings my downstroke, for example, is moving in the same direction as the next upcoming higher string I have to strike. Even though I'll have to change directions for the upswing, it is still a more natural feeling movement. I can float back and forth DUDUDU on 323232 a lot easier than I can DUDUDU on 232323.
I analyzed some licks Joe Maphis used a lot for his lightning fast flash playing and found an interesting pattern where he often plays descending across the strings with all string crossings being downstrokes (always crossing strings with an "outside pair" movement, his being sure to end play on any string with an up pick, and then the downstroke falls to the move to the lower adjacent string). This seemed to confirm that this wasn't just an idiosyncratic thing with me, but a real technical difficulty and that Maphis was keying in to that easier transition from one string to the next from the outsides. Here is a Joe Maphis G lick I broke down that makes a good ending. The first 2 strings I play 3d position (left hand fingers 1 and 3). The 3d and 4th strings are 2nd position (left hand fingers 1 and 3);
--3-5-3-0---------------------------------------------------------
------------3-5-3-0------------------------------------------------
-----------------------4-2-0-4-2-0-------0-2-4-0-2-0---------0--
--------------------------------------2-4------------------2-4------
---------------------------------------------------------------------
Predicatbly for me, the hardest 2 spots in that lick when I start trying to go fast are where I have to cross to from the 4th string to the 3d from inside the pair (the 16th note to the 17th in the lick, and the last 2 notes of the lick)
In Kamp this Summer I asked Roy Curry about this in class and he humorously said he hoped my bringing it up and making him think about it wouldn't screw up his playing for 6 months! (From Winfield results it looks like I did him no harm!....or ..maybe he would have taken first place again if I'd kept my mouth shut!...Sorry Roy)
Anyway, I am doing some work with scale fragments (an Al Dimeola practice technique) and, said a different way by Russ Barenberg (but essentially the same thing) playing fragments up to the point of a difficulty where I crash, and then stopping right there and repeating the fragment over and over.
Is that (was that ever) a more difficult string crossing pattern for you? What exercises did you do to smooth that out so that inside pair crossings were the same difficulty as outside pairs?
Sorry this is so long! 
Dale
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| Mark |
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Reply with quote | #2 |
I actually had to get the guitar out for this one. Here's my problem in answering your question. As I came along as a player I never really analyzed what I did. That came much later when teaching someone else what different techniques I know got in the mix. My pick direction choices etc. are very unconscious and they change all the time according to the situation and difficulty of the passage. For example, as a general rule I'm a DDU crosspicker but will instantly switch to DUD if it seems like the line of least resistance to get what I'm trying to do. That's the way I learned because there just wasn't the same atmosphere back then of breaking things down for video and DVD etc. I wish there was in a way but in another way I'm kind of glad to have just bulled my way through and made discoveries that may have taken more time but stuck better for me. Kind of like learning a piece with my ears instead of from paper.
All this adds up to a pretty unsatisfactory answer for you I suppose and that is: I do it differently all the time! Time behind the box is the key. It always seems to come down to that.
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