Technique

Here are two things I just figured out about the Earthquaker Interstellar Orbiter and Fairfield Circuitry's Randy's Revenge. I don't usually do gear posts here and maybe they're obvious to everyone else but I see some confusion about the former online and the latter took me a bit of effort to work out.

I've been immersing myself in early 20th century piano music again lately and getting lots of ideas for the guitar. One thing you see happening at that time is increasing rhythmic flexibility and sophistication, and this often comes from the use of tuplets. You can see it all over Ravel and Debussy, not to mention of course the wilder folks like Scriabin and Sorabji, and it continues into more modernistic composers like Boulez and Xenakis too.

A long while ago I posted this hybrid picking exercise. I've recently gone back to it and extended it a bit. Here are some variations.

Next year the term "deliberate practice" will be twenty years old; in that time it has gradually moved out of the academic world and become a phrase uttered in hushed tones in musical, sporting and other spheres. What does it mean and how can we use it?

If you've ever worked on developing speed on guitar you've probably heard references to "muscle memory". But what is this mysterious facility? Is it something real or just a part of musicians' folklore? Can we do anything to make our learning more efficient, or should we be suspicious of "automatic" playing as less creative?

In my own playing I've decided it's time to focus on technique again, which I haven't really given much attention to in the last 12 months. Here's my plan for the next year.

I always play with a thumbpick, and have for decades. I get asked about this a lot because it's extremely unusual for someone who doesn't do a lot of acoustic fingerpicking. I believe the thumbpick can be a very good choice for electric guitarists, and here I'm going to say why.

Just a quick post to mention the hybrid picking exercise I've been working on for the past few days. I'm actually playing different variations on this up and down but I'm sure you can figure those out for yourself.

I've had about a month of enforced lack of practice; this happens to all of us from time to time. As I often do I devised a little etude to get my hands warmed up and in synch again. I'll be practicing this for the next couple of weeks, and probably using it as a warmup after that, so I thought you might like to try it yourself.

Recently we looked at 2-string ladder patterns for the Whole-Half and Half-Whole Diminished scales (since they're modes of each other, the patterns work equally well for both scales). Here we'll look at some similar patterns covering three strings.