Month: July 2021

Reduction

Playing through the ‘skeleton’ of a tremolo piece helps to reduce it in our mind’s ear to what essentially is happening on the musical front. Spending a large amount of time on developing the fluidity, clarity, speed, and all that goes into a beautiful tremolo technique so often draws a majority of our attention into the micro-discovery world that the thought of the larger macro world of what a tremolo piece is trying to achieve musically is somewhat ignored.

There are various ways to enhance the way we psychologically perceive our pieces to make them seem less daunting. The most tried and true method is to play through them hundreds of times. For tremolo pieces, play through them in an abbreviated way, as illustrated below, at faster tempos:

Another method, which I have grown to like despite the substandard sonic quality, was recommended by Malaysian guitar virtuoso, Philip Hii

Aural Refocus

This is an interesting technique that I have found truly helpful for developing speed and the correct rhythmic feel across whatever pattern you are practicing, and since I have not found any reference to it in the literature, I refer to it as aural refocus. Its purpose is to refocus your hearing on the larger beats within a pattern or movement, and then “feed in” the rest of the notes while retaining attention on the larger concept and rhythmic feel.

In theory, we want to perform the larger movements in time—but in practice we rarely do so because we feel limited by all the minutiae that a particular movement demands. With a lot of work, patterns that undergo the aural refocus treatment will get a boost in speed while retaining their rhythmic integrity and stability.

Here are three exercises for applying aural refocus to tremolo. Before you…