estebanana -> RE: "Andalusian" Guitars (no trolling) (Mar. 6 2011 20:14:23)
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quote:
2) I am not Jason Mcquire or Ricardo so please do not criticize my playing too badly ...I play for fun and the occasional gig. I usually play with a metronome to help me keep time but I didn't want to muddy the sound of the guitars For several months now I have been musing over your screen name and wondering how in the heck you settled on it. It's odd the way words work or the way we see signs, I was reading your name as Rum-Baking for months and finally today I realized you probably meant Rumba King. So I kept mulling this over in my mind, how I was finally going to ask you how you arrived at Rum Baking. I thought perhaps you are a baker and you specialize in some secret recipe for a rum cake. Anyway, mystery, I think, solved. Your playing seems fine to me and I would only say one thing that you need to bring more into focus, or be more sensitive to, that would be dynamics. A lot of your playing is monotone, well almost all of it. If you played in such a way that you actually were really, really over determined to make great differences between passages dynamically lots of things in your playing would com together. Even Jason, who I know very well, would say that. I discuss technical musical stuff with him all the time as a way of understanding guitar making and what guitarists need. One thing you could try is to move your hand up and down the distance between the bridge and end of the finger board and experiment with playing softer and harder in different places. Just take one or two phrases, like twenty or so seconds of music and just turn it inside out dynamically. Play it slow and only focus on how loud a soft different parts of the phrase are. In part where you think it should be soft play it loud and then right after that lower the intensity so you play next group of notes really soft. Try to create huge contrasts between intense and soft. Once you get a feel for the chasm between hard driving and ultra soft laying back then look for the middle ground feelings which is where you should basically live as a guitarist. You're living in the medium to hard driving zone of the envelope of sound and that's cool, but for that to have meaning it needs to be contrasted by it's opposite. Your hands look pretty good and your sound is good, but by paying attention to only your dynamics for a while, few week maybe, it will soften your right hand and make it even more supple. When that happens you really begin to find your true voice on the guitar. The guitar itself can't live in that over driven place and I hear hints of the guitar wanting to be left more alone so it can talk. It's like driving the guitar is you being willful about making it talk, when the guitar will do a lot of talking for you if you learn to let it do it's thing. You can think of it as a call and response dialog with the guitar. Drive a phrase hard, then play the same phrase and try to do it softer so the guitar talks on it's own. Then arrive at some mutual agreement between the two of you. Hope you don't mind my observation.
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