Thursday, June 05, 2008

Slow Learner

I have been trying to teach myself a guitar technique called tremolo. this is a repeated quick strum of a string so that it has a quavery, echo-effect. Mandolin players can wail on this using a pick, but using a classical guitar, you do it with two or three fingers.

I haven't gotten it. Probably would be helped some if I didn't keep breaking one of my damn fingernails, as I did only yesterday, fetching the laundry out of the washer to transfer to the dryer. (Real classical guitarists get out of housework this way -- sorry, honey, I can't risk breaking a nail, you know? That doesn't go 'round here, alas.)

Anyway, this is going to be my baseline vid on this technique. I'm going to record it again in six months, then at a year, and see if I have gotten any closer ...


4 comments:

Michael Canfield said...

Sounds great to me. How long have you been playing guitar?

Steve Perry said...

Not long enough.

I've been piddling with it for a long time. I got a guitar as a kid, but mostly it spent its life propped next the file cabinet. Last five or six years, I've tried to get more methodical about it.

I took a lesson once, guy showed me a blues riff. I came home, practiced it, and then realized why it sounded familiar -- it was the music behind the Cialis commericial on the tube ...

J.D. Ray said...

You could have widened the shot a little to let us see what your right hand was doing, since in this case that's the business end of the playing. And, chances are good that we would either learn something or have some advice (the former in my case, I can assure you, though maybe both).

Steve Perry said...

I don't expect people would learn much watching me play, but I'll back the camera off a little for the update.