Miguel de Maria -> RE: MASTERING THE TREMOLO TECHNIQUE (May 2 2005 17:36:19)
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James, if you've only been working on tremolo for a month, I wouldn't worry. It does take time to "click." Your problem is not speed. If you can type in a telephone number before the phone hangs up, you have enough speed to do a tremolo. Let me share a few thoughts with you. People think of the action of the fingers in different ways, a) sequentially, as in you play one finger, then you play another finger, and then you play another... or b) sympathetically, that the motions of the fingers are connected. Sympathetic movement is a little less intuitive, but paradoxically, much more common in our daily life. Observe your fingers as you grasp a mug, and you will see that the fingers work in concert. Another, more closely related motion is the act of drumming your fingers on the table, as in impatience. You will see the fingers moving in concert here as well. The focus of most guitar instruction is on getting your fingers to move independently. However, I feel this can be misguided. the fingers don't want to move independently, and don't need to. In fact, moving them independently introduces tension into the hand. If you put your thumb on the fourth string, a on the 1st, m on the 2nd, i on the third, and play them all togther, this is a block chord. Used a lot in classical and brazilian music. Now do the same thing, but stagger them very slightly. pami with a tiny delay between the notes. It will be something like a strum. If you can do this, you can make the mental leap to understand that a block chord is pami at infinite speed, and by SLOWING down the other fingers, you can play a pami arpeggio VERY QUICKLY. If you can agree with this assessment, then you will see that extremely fast speeds are available to you. Of course, this speed, which is based on sympathetic movement, is only usable, paradoxically, by finger independence. What does this have to do with tremolo? Put the p on the fourth string, the ami on the 1st string, and do the same thing. Play a block chord. Yes, use the ami to pluck the string. Now stagger teh attack, and you will get a very fast ami tremolo on that string. Finger speed is not required, and has no place here. It is control. You have to keep the feeling of playing a block chord, slightly modifying it. The flamenco tremolo is obtained by adding to this paradigm. It works if you play pi, then ami. It is a compound stroke, thus more complex than the pami classical tremolo. You probably won't have any problems playing pi as fast as you want. A lot of people will dismiss this technique out of hand, because it goes against everything that is commonly taught to guitarists. It gives results so easily and quickly that it feels like "cheating." You can play the tremolo as fast as you want the first time you do it! Contrast this with the way of teaching you should play one note at a time, very slowly, and build up to speed. This is a kind of "penance" that everyone should go through before they can play what they want, right? Play using sympathetic motion, and once you have the feeling down, use all the other techniques--slowing down, one finger at a time, stacatto, changing the accents, to refine your control and your touch. But the essential motion is the block chord, which is really the same feeling of grabbing a cup. If you can keep this model of movement in your head when you play, you will play easily and without tension. I hope you try it! :) It helped me so much.
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