Guitar Lessons in Bed Stuy Brooklyn

Category: Tone

Best Way For Singer-Songwriters To Draw Attention? Play Quietly

Cast A Spell With Your Guitar series Part 1 – Play Quietly

Cast A Spell With Your Guitar

Great solo performers can cast a spell on their audience with a sense of personal intimacy and you can too if you use dynamics well. What creates closeness between people? Think about it:

low lights – quiet – listening – space – closeness – patience

This translates into music as silence between notes, simplicity, low volume. Just like when you speak quietly to a friend they pay more attention to hear what you’re saying. It’s like a secret for their ears only.

YOUR dynamic range is fixed, either by the settings of the sound system or the lack of one. For your dramatic moments to have an impact on your fans’ feelings you need to set your basic groove at a medium or quiet level so that when you get loud and big, they FEEL it. If you start out fairly loud you have no room to expand upward, only downward.

Experiment 1 – Try playing one of your tunes as quietly as you can on your own. The lower you go, the more tools you’ll have to really connect with your fans. Put down the phone and try it.

(Coming in part 2: Using Silence)

September 26, 2019
Feel the Space Between the Notes

Play a note, or chord, and just listen. Meet that note. Look it in the eye. Hear its personality. Don’t move to another one until you’ve actually listened to the present one.

When you do this the most remarkable thing usually happens: you relax. It makes playing so much easier and more enjoyable. You improve with ease.

June 20, 2018
Guitarists, Rather Than Going for What’s ‘Right’…

Music is so much more fluid than we often treat it. When we get caught up in whether we are playing it “right”, we run the risk of not hearing what we are doing well. If you’re caught in the trap of “WRONGNESS” try this:

For now, rather than going for what’s ‘right’, go for what you think sounds good. Learning music is a process and you are somewhere in the middle of it so, for now, go for your good tempo, your best rhythm, your best note choices.

Listen for what you are playing that is good and build from there. Perfection is the result, not the method.

September 11, 2014
Guitar Pull-offs Were Named Wrong

They should have been called “pop-offs”.

I don’t mean any disrespect to the great Pete Seeger who brought us modern tablature and named the pull-off, it’s just that if you only pull your finger off of the string, it may not ring. If you pop the string with the edge of your fingertip, you’ll hear it ring out.

Try it.

Play a note on the first string (bottom) and instead of lifting your finger up and away from the string, pop the string by pulling down and away, sort of plucking it with your fingertip.

July 23, 2014
We Don’t Really Play Guitar With Our Fingers

We play with our finger TIPS.
I know that seems obvious, but we often don’t do it. If we spend some time getting used to this weird use of our hand, playing guitar becomes easier. The reason is this:

The bone does 70% of the work.

When the finger gradually curves to come straight down onto the string, much less energy is needed. The bones of your finger form an arch, which taps down onto the string like a C-clamp with half the effort than if we use the padded bottom of our finger.

July 17, 2014
Why Practice Guitar Slow?

Well, you may have heard several reasons, but this is my favorite:

To witness what you actually do instead of what you think you should be doing.

We are usually so caught up in trying to match some ideal in our head that we can’t hear what we actually sound like.
Play slowly so you can notice what you notice. Then you can fix things.

June 17, 2014