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Miguel de Maria -> Strength and Volume (Dec. 16 2003 21:04:51)
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There is a local player who is very humbling to jam with. Every time you play with him, he plays so aggressively,it's like trying to fingerpick next to a waterfall. He strums really hard, and makes you feel like you're really lacking in firepower. I have played with him a few times and left shaking my head, feeling really small, feeling like I wasn't a very good player. With some physical and temporal distance, though I start to think: it's not that he was playing good stuff, he's just loud!
Now I listen to a lot of CDs and it seems that most good players play pretty hard. I've been trying to amp up my sound and get that effortless power. In a class I had with Pedro Cortes, he said we should all play for dancers, because guitarists who don't never get that power, that aggressiveness. The humbling player, of course, played with dancers for years.
I thought to myself that, although I occasionally do play with dancers, I don't need to do that. I just have to apply reason to the problem. Now, how do you get volume and power?
There are two large elements here, one is the power applied to the strings, two is the direction from which the power is applied.
The first impulse of most people when trying for power is to tense up and muscle the strings, the feeling similar to bench-pressing heavy weights. This is wrong. Power is speed, not strength. For example, many of us know how to do the marble finger flick ras. You hold the tip of the index finger behind the thumb and let it go, splacking into the strings and makign a ferocious, percussive,noise. Strength is not required in this endeavor but speed is. Speed is a function of relaxed muscles, tension slows them down. You can't get good power with tension.
Start slow and accelerate, keeping the fingers loose, floppy. It's more like whipping a towel, like swinging a hammer. You let the hammer do the work for you, you don't start the swing hard, but loose. Use this feeling for everything from golpe superior to loud picado. When I play picado, I am thinking of a relaxed squeezing motion, not a jerk or a poke. Yet with this relaxed thinking I get good volume and all the speed I need.
The second element is geometry. This is pretty easy, really. Louder sounds come from pushing the strings into the guitar, as opposed to sideways. Picado--strings are pushed into the guitar, free strokes--make sure the fingers push the strings down before relasing, rasgeuedo--a downward angle.
Now if you figure out the right geometry, and you play with good speed and no tension, your volume will get to good levels very quickly! This way of playing, in some cases, does take more strength. If you are not used to displacing the string very much, it will tire your hands. But like squeezing a rubber ball...more of a fatigue thing.
Now, if you practice hard at home, slowly increasing your volume, you will find that you start to play that way naturally. It's more flamenco to play loud. And you don't have to play loud, but having the strength and the upper limit give you great dynamic range. It's another step to mastering the instrument. And of course playing for dancers necessitates power.
A good friend of mine plays for dancers a lot and the volume problem has caused him to use about every part of the body to get power. When he plays thumb parts, he goes about four inches above the guitar and slams it down. His fingers get about three inches away from the strings..all in a misguided effort to get a running start and muscle it down. It's like the golfer who winds up so far he loses his balance, pulls down hard from the top, ends up slicing the ball. Take a 3/4 swing, pull down gently and accelerate, hit the sweet spot, and watch that little ball disappear!
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