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Posts: 377
Joined: Nov. 22 2005
From: Quepos / Manuel Antonio, Costa Rica
Tremolo trouble
I'm told to always do rest strokes with the thumb when doing tromolo, exept when struming the 2nd string..for obvious reasons! (assuming that I'm doing tremolo on the 2st string) But I find that if I do rest strokes even on the 3rd string, my tremolo goes out the window...my fingers are just too close together. What do you guys do? Do I just need to learn to keep my tremolo smooth while doing rest strokes on the 3rd string, or can I "cheat" and do free strokes? Keep in mind that I want to learn the "proper" technique.
I saw Chuscales play Recuerdos in Sante Fe with all apoyanda, rest stroke on the thumb and he did it all with the Flamenco tremolo instead of a 3 note classical tremelo.
Needless to say it blew my mind.
Resting the thumb while doing arpeggios or tremolo is very hard, its takin me almost 9 months to be able to rest my thumb while doing either one.
Yes staccato practice for tremolo and scales is a must.
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I'm told to always do rest strokes with the thumb when doing tromolo, exept when struming the 2nd string..for obvious reasons!
Victor;
There are many things you can do to improve your Tremolo. On my web site there is a simple exercise that uses only the 1st string to practice Tremolo. The reason for this exercise is to build strength for the required technique.
Juan Serrano taught me many exercises to improve your Tremolo. You can find most of them in his music literature.
Thanks Tom and Edgar. Tom, do you rest your thumb on the 3rd string? I'll have a look on your web site, but at work I sometimes don't have the software to view some of the files.
As with any technique, you'll always play tremolo differently when doing an exercise than when you play freely. In an exersize it would be correct to play apoyando with rest strokes on every string, also the string above the tremolo string. It's not the only possibility, though - there are different schools.
The closer your thumb comes to the fingers, the further apart you should position thumb and fingers horizontally so they have more room. The tension when playing should be at the tips of the fingers striking inward towards the palm of the hand. Use a mirror to make sure you hand doesn't bop up and down. A metronome set at one beat for each tremolo tone can help, too.
It will never look exactly perfect when playing freely, but should sound more and more like it - here you just have to count on the exercises to have taught you the right thing. For example when playing quickly, the thumb might just bounce slightly against the string below the one you're playing instead of really resting on it.
Try leaving a space AFTER the bass note, so it feels like the fingers "fall" like a grace note into the next bass note. It is easy to rest the thumb that way on any string, even 2nd. P......iamiP........iamiP......etc. When practicing at a slow tempo, keep the fingers fairly quick, but put a space after the thumb. As you increase your tempo, close the time gap between thumb and index finger stroke, rather than increase speed of finger strokes. Pretty soon it will sound smooth with the resting the thumb thing feeling very natural.
Try to think less in terms of "I can" or "I can't yet". It'll get better and better all the time. I'm still making improvements and discoveries in my technique too, and I've played for over a decade!
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