Tag: guitar tips

Building Right Hand Confidence

Published on by Leo Garcia1 Comment

Building Right Hand Confidence

Here is a list to help you build confidence in your right hand while you work on your repertoire. Hope it helps.

  1. Use sequential and block planting as much as possible.
  2. Plant the thumb (p) where it does not interfere with the music and resonances to help i, m, and a have a stable finger to move against. Plant the fingers as a group or individually (ima, im, ma, i, m, a) so that p has a stability point to move against. Avoid floating above the strings.
  3. Practice sections of your songs with your right hand alone. This helps even in the most simple passages to clarify right-hand position and rhythm. It also forces you to make right-hand fingering decisions.
  4. Look at your right hand when practicing a passage. Aiming for the string helps. Unless you are particularly physically gifted, our brains don’t always map our reality perfectly, so aiming is one way to ensure the fingers are going to land in the right place. While watching your fingers, study what they are doing.
  5. Practice exercises that are extracted from your repertoire in addition to your other skill-building technique exercises. You will usually find interesting things to do that are being demanded of your right hand that you hadn’t noticed before.
  6. Observe the orientation of your right-hand fingers: are they aligned over strings 4321? 5321? 5432? When does the orientation change? Or are i and m aligned on the same string?
  7. Proximity to the strings is also surprisingly effective when it comes to right-hand control. Try practicing in pianissimo and, again, watch those fingers to see if they are straying beyond their allocated territory.
  8. Use rest strokes strategically. The nature of the rest stroke is that it helps stabilize the right hand because you are apoyado, or supported, after the stroke with string contact.
  9. Dragging or sweeping with the same right-hand finger is fine. If you play a rest stroke with m on string 1, your m ends up resting on string 2. If you need to play string 2, it’s ok to use m as a free stroke. In the context of a chord, this works well.
  10. Make sure that your nail shape is not creating displacement in the hand that requires a recovery movement to realign the fingers. Nail shape is personal, but if you have to move your wrist in addition to the finger joints, rethink your nail shape.
  11. Break rules if they help you feel stable. I sometimes like using i repeatedly if I’m playing something slowly on the same string. It’s easy to get a consistent tone while the other fingers plant to support a great stroke.
  12. Keep p in contact with the next lowest string when playing free stroke. If i and m are playing a melodic phrase on string 2, p should rest on string 3, for example. This helps keep the weight of the hand centered behind the strings you are playing, allowing less effort from the stroke.
  13. Relax. Make sure your wrist and arm are as relaxed as possible. If you are holding tension in your hand or farther up your wrist and arm, moving efficiently is more stressful and slower.

Twelve Tips on Rolling, Shifting, and More

Published on by Leo GarciaLeave a comment

by Leonardo Garcia

I originally thought I would do videos to show some of the concepts below in practice but in anticipation of that I thought this might help some of my students so I’ll post it now. These are some recurring themes that I encounter in lessons that have solved a lot of little musical hiccups. Hope they help.

Chord Rolling

  1. When rolling chords where should the weight of the right hand fingers be distributed? I find that even though we tend to roll towards the a finger in a musical context that not ‘feeling’ the weight behind the i finger leads to a less rhythmic roll.
  2. Accompanying chords can sound really nice when subtly rolled. I recently listened to John Williams’s old Barrios recording and loved his playing of Choro de Saudade. He is very free with the harmonic background even when grooving.
  3. When playing an ornament with a bass note (like all over Capricho Árabe), I find that rolling the bass and first note of the ornament diffuses the rhythm a bit too much unless (maybe) it is a cadential ornament. Maybe not the best place to roll.
  4. Rolling p – Practice this to make it sound less like a guitar affectation and more like an organic roll. Or in the case of playing thirds in a piece like the Gran Solo (Sor), roll with the intention of it sounding like one note. Imagine both strings as one large string the thumb has to traverse in its stroke.

Shifting

  1. Shifting with a relaxed (or less rigid) left hand wrist always feel better and leads to less unintentional accenting when landing in the new position.
  2. Sometimes it helps to keep left hand finger pressure down before glissandos to minimize string squeaks.
  3. Always shift using a guide finger and always relax the left hand thumb away from the back of the neck prior to a shift.

Listening and Accountability

  1. As I play through repertoire, I find that shifting my aural focus to a particular voice can be disorienting sometimes because of the tendency to grow accustomed to ‘hearing’ the music unfold in relation to the melodic content most of the time. So I like to change it up by listening for the bass lines or by shifting my attention to the supporting voices or even to exaggerate (or exaggerate another voice) the melodic content to keep listening in new ways.
  2. Stop whenever something does not sound optimal and study that moment. Then place it back into context by a few notes or measures. Keep asking why and what. Why does it not feel comfortable? What do I want the phrase/pair of notes/background/melody, etc., to sound like? Can I make one note sound the way I want? Two? Why did it work? Can I replicate what is not working so I know how NOT to do that? If you keep playing something that you know doesn’t sound quite right, it is basically how you will play the piece. Don’t rely on luck, if you only nail it 1 out of 4 or 5 tries. Hold yourself accountable.

Speed

  1. Think of gestures especially during faster passages. Find groups of notes and tie them into one physical gesture that feels comfortable to do. Consolidate movements and placements to make many notes fall into one activity for the hands. This is why it is good to practice arpeggio formulas and scales in abstract.

Meter

  1. During scale runs, focus on hearing the main beat subdivisions. If you have 4 quarter notes worth of sixteenths, after working out the correct fingerings in both hands, spend some time listening and then aiming for the quarter beat or the half beat regardless of where the high point of the run is.
  2. Clarity in your playing is enhanced if you know where all the downbeats are in relation to your left hand (and right!). It sounds obvious but play though a piece and just think of downbeats and left hand. Try the same for downbeats and right hand.

Thanks for reading.

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