kitarist -> RE: how to get cleaner sound on bar? (Apr. 9 2021 2:43:29)
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From my experience and analysis, getting a clean barre has three basic elements: 1. (How much pressure) Applying not more than about the minimum total effort necessary to get a clean sound: this is where a type of exercise like Ricardo's is very useful. Pumping Nylon talks about it as well as any more recent classical guitar method, I think. Note that the minimum effort during plucking is slightly higher than the minimum effort after that just holding that ringing note. So once you get that kind of sensitivity you could even try to relax it a bit after a stroke and would still maintain clean sound. 2. (How to generate that pressure) From my own think about this and experience, the key is to generate most of what is required with a small pull of the entire left forearm, from the elbow towards your back, upper arm rotating around the shoulder. Obviously the fingers are not loose but the pressure to push the fingertips into the fretboard is now generated mostly as a small pull with the left lat(*) rather than from a thumb clamp. (But you don't think about lats, just think about moving your left elbow backward a bit; this will activate the left lat) For this to work well, the fretboard has to be kept in place, so you also apply a small counter with your right arm against the top bout/edge of the guitar (with your right lat; but again think about right elbow squeeze/move backward) - otherwise the guitar, viewed as one plays it, would tend to want to rotate in response to the left hand elbow pull with the left lat. In the classical guitar position where the neck is much higher and the fretboard is turned a bit toward the ceiling (they like to be able to see the surface of their fretboard), the usual advice is "let the left arm weight pull the fingers down" - they mean that as your left arm hangs, there is a torque from gravity around the left shoulder so that results in a bit of a pull into the fretboard. Two things: first, just the "weight" is not enough, you still need a bit of lat pull, and second, this explanation is generally inapplicable for other guitar holds, like for flamenco; it is sort of helpful for the particular case of a very classical guitar hold. But the more general idea is as described in the previous two paragraphs; in the particular case of a classical guitar hold, it can be roughly proxied with what the classical guitarists advise in terms of weight of arm. As an exercise (not for regular playing), you should get to a point where you can produce a clean sound without any thumb - it being entirely off the neck - including full barres either with or without any other left-hand-finger use. When doing this properly and combining it with (1), i.e. with minimum required amount of effort for a clean sound using what is a feather-effort pull from the big lat muscles, this feels like almost nothing and the thumb hardly has to do much more than anchoring and little secondary adjustments. 3. (Minimizing interference from left-hand non-barre fingers) This is specific to fingerings involving a barre - you might find that you can do a clean full barre when the other left hand fingers are not being used to fret any notes, but that you lose some of the clean barred notes (on the remaining strings) when adding other left-hand fingers as in different chord shapes (or vice-versa). Work on left-hand finger independence to minimize interference of the left-hand fretting 2nd, 3rd, 4th fingers with the full or partial first-finger barre. The left-hand finger independence exercises from Pumping Nylon are useful for this, but just practice problematic configurations till the sensitivity and independence develops so that moving around and pressing on different position with the non-barre fingers does not affect the pressure of the barre finger. In some situations it is still difficult to produce clean barred finger sounds despite getting good at the three elements above. If so, -- one trick is to turn the barring finger around its long axis a bit (in my case counter-clockwise if viewed from a player's perspective); -- another, if the 2nd finger is available, is to add some pressure with it as if closing scissors (2nd finger closes in on top of barring 1st finger). You can see this in some Paco de Lucia videos; -- focusing on just the notes fretted with the barred finger, like Jason described; -- experimenting with the left-hand thumb position and adding a bit of thumb clamp just opposite the offending string/note(s); (*) lat = latissimus dorsi back muscle.
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