I have an embarrassing confession to make. A few years back, I was thinking of playing in a master class for Pepe Romero. I remember thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool if he saw my right hand and at least thought to himself, ‘Hey, this guy’s got it going on!'” I videotaped myself playing some repertoire, and to my shock, none of the principles I had learned in my technical work, aside from positioning, were evident. My movements were tight, negating the fluid affects of true alternation or sympathetic motion.
Yet I can easily replicate these movement forms in my technique. I have been teaching rules for alternation and sympathetic motion to all my students for decades, and we all exercise these movements in our technical work with scales and arpeggios. And since roughly 98% of the guitar’s repertoire is comprised of one of these two movement forms I assumed that simply mastering them in technical work would be enough to allow them to ‘roll over’ into repertoire.
Sadly, I found after decades, that these movements do not come to fruition in the sense of applying themselves to our repertoire! We must consciously and perhaps continually integrate the patterns into our repertoire if we want the benefits to manisfest in performance. This, as you can imagine, was quite a sobering realization. But, as I thought about it I realized that my performances were always less satisfying than I wanted with regards to technique. It seemed that my hand would tire, tighten and I would make mistakes that I knew I shouldn’t. At times on stage I would feel like my hands weren’t my own! But why? Well, I found two reasons. 1) These movement forms can’t exist when the distance the finger should travel is shortened and 2) the actual analysis of the movement forms must be notated and practiced into the repertoire.
Range of Motion
First, let’s talk about Range of Motion: the distance the finger travels whenever it makes a stroke. A shortened range of motion is tight—the result of exerting the flexors and extensors almost simultaneously. As an analogy, think of driving your car with both the gas and break pedals held down. The tightness causes tension. But, when we perform, we want to be accurate. Here is the big disconnect: accuracy is not attained by keeping your fingers close to the strings, but by employing a motion that exhausts the flexors which results in more motion inwards. Continue reading →
