TEChNIquE MAKEOVER Top 10 problems solved!
Common pitfalls plague all players. Richard Barrett looks at the 10 most common technical problems and offers a strategy to improve each one, with 10 bespoke examples, mini pieces and backing tracks.
New Year Revolution! Richard Barrett looks at 10 common areas where our guitar playing can suffer, then provides brilliant examples to hone each one back into shape for the coming year.
It’s hardwired into the nature of most musicians to constantly strive toward an ever increasing level of technical mastery. That might sound a bit grandiose at first, but it doesn’t actually have to mean virtuosic, rippling arpeggios or machine-gun-like alternate picking. It might just translate as smoother chord changes, more fluid improvisation, or simply better timing.
Whichever way you look at it, it’s a very appealing thought to have the ability and freedom to accurately transpose our musical ideas from our brains, through our hands and onto the instrument, particularly if we can avoid the potentially inspiration-sapping process of spending hours on a trial and error hunt. Or indeed mindless technique squarebashing. That approach can risk taking the shine off any new discoveries for even the most dedicated among us. With that established, where do we go from here?
Though it’s true to say that simply spending time playing naturally leads to progress (however incremental), things can very easily become stagnant – or even deteriorate – if we don’t reappraise our approach to the fine technical details from time to time. When an exciting new idea presents itself, it’s completely natural to prioritise getting it out of our heads and onto the fretboard ahead of less artistically satisfying considerations, such as calculating the best fretting-hand position, fingering, or picking technique, especially as many of the best ideas can occur spontaneously.
Taking a balanced view, swinging too far in either direction probably isn’t the best way to make great music consistently – and that’s where these exercises and mini pieces come in. Once our fingers have been through a set series of movements a few times, it can be a frustratingly lengthy process educating them out of any ‘bad’ habits that aren’t working for us. So, if we accept that we’re bound to occasionally veer off the path somewhat and commit to doing a bit of ‘maintenance’ with our technique periodically (maybe think of this as a 10,000-note service?) then it’s possible to keep our interest piqued with a relatively fast influx of new ideas without drifting too far of track, or getting bogged down in too many ruts.
As far as our examples go, it’s possible to strip them down and practise individual rudiments, which are reflected in the short exercises that preface each piece. But the focus here is more on creating musical solutions rather than pulling our musicality to pieces in the search for clinical perfection (I’d bet that most of your favourite players strike that balance, too).
I’ve chosen a variety of styles for the musical demo tracks, many of these reflecting contemporary rock techniques, but these are merely a ‘serving suggestion’; you don’t need to feel like there is a definitive stylistic path to follow here. In fact, it might be a good idea to cross-fertilise the least likely techniques and genres and see what you can create. Hot tapping country, anyone?