Running Blues

Guitar Lessons (Part 1):

Quite recently (in June), I went off to The Music Lab to sign up for one of their Electric Guitar courses under an instructor named Izzat. Every friday evening since then, I have been going over to the school in Bugis to attend my 45-min lessons. A wide range of guitar knowledge is covered during lesson time which includes technique and theory. Originally, my idea for taking lessons was to improve my Blues solo-ing technique but Izzat introduced me to a lot of other styles of playing (other than Blues I mean).

For the first few lessons, the emphasis was not so much of what is played, but HOW it is played. I used to anchor my picking hand on the bridge of the guitar for better support when playing fast passages – It turned out to be a less popular technique when it comes to playing cleanly. So now, I have been playing with my palm resting on the strings instead and my playing has become significantly neater and cleaner. The trick to achieving a clean run during playing is to move the picking hand down (or up) the strings so that the palm mutes the string after it has been played (and when the next note goes to another string). This prevents the previous string from making excessive ringing sounds and will greatly clear up your playing. I am still trying to see how this can be applied to passages where the notes are played from the lowest strings up to the higher strings because muting it with the palm seems rather unnatural (I think Izzat mentioned to me that it is not as necessary to mute when going up because the fretting hand will do most of the muting for you, I am still trying to work that out).

Another technique which I have come to change after attending lessons had to do with the way my fretting hand is positioned with the thumb behind the back (almost always). Although I do wrap the thumb around the neck if I wanted to do bends and stuff like that, I had always imagined myself to be able to play faster with the thumb behind the neck, which was not true. Izzat showed me a few exercises which used the thumb around the neck method to build up strength in my fretting hand. Speed, as always, came with practice.

The reason why I used to think that having the thumb around the neck was slower was simply because I had never tried using it extensively. Now I have, and although I am still getting up to speed, I find myself being able to better control the neck of the guitar because my hand now grips in a better position around it. My note control has improved since I adopted the thumb around the neck technique and I encourage anyone who is reading to give it a try. It may seem unnatural to play some fast passages with this technique, but the idea is to keep building finger strength so that your fretting hand becomes stronger even with the thumb around the neck.

I found that the first four lessons really changed the basics of how I played and I am working hard on it along with all the other ideas and knowledge that came in subsequent lessons. I am glad that I went to my guitar lessons with an open mind because the techniques I learnt really helped improve my playing.

That’s all for this brief update (phew! haven’t blogged in a while), I’ll continue with part 2 later on.