Wednesday, October 08, 2008

Jesu

One more tune in today's practice session ...

7 comments:

Stephen Grey said...

Dude, you're killing.

How did you get that good so quick? I've been watching your guitar playing on this blog on and off since you started posting these vids and your improvement is nothing short of phenomenal.

But don't visit the crossroads at midnight, it's just not worth it.

Check out this amazing 18-year-old girl guitarist Nili Brosh:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhdln9pA-9Q&feature=related

This one really doesn't show how hard she can shred, check out her other vids too, she's really something.

Time to go rip up my Ibanez...

Steve Perry said...

"Good" doesn't go in the same sentence with "me" and "guitar ..."

What I can manage hasn't been quick, either.

But I am slowly progressing and I'm having a fine ole time. Good things.

Stephen Grey said...

You must have been practicing pretty heavily. I will give you a little warning.

You're apparently self-taught and self-taught guitarists, especially classical ones, often have severe trouble with tendonitis because of non-optimal posture. It's serious shit.

If you experience ANY pain or numbness in your left hand while playing guitar, quit playing IMMEDIATELY, ice it, and let kindly old Ibu Profen work her magic. And take a break for a couple of days.

Steve Perry said...

I'm pretty careful with my positions. I got a drummer's throne so I'd learn to keep my back straight. I use a Neck-up rest so I can keep both feet flat on the floor and not propped up. (Lot of classical guys get sciatica from that.) And my average practice session is an hour-and-a-half, sometimes less, sometimes more, with frequent breaks. And I learned how to use back and shoulder to help in fingering the strings, rather than depending on hand strength. When you see these little kids playing, you realize they can't have the hand power necessary to do barres so it has to come from somewhere else.

Stephen Grey said...

Do you know about the hand weight method?

My average practice session is 6 hours, and I'm having to cut back, finally getting pain in the left hand after many years. I may go so far as to put my left hand in a cast for a month. 4-note per string patterns and 7 fret stretches finally got to me...

Steve Perry said...

Yep, I have seen a bunch of ways to train hands. Truth is, I'm not ever going to need those, because six hours a day is way beyond what I'm willing to do. Segovia practiced six hours a day, but for me, that would simply be overtraining.

If you have had those kinds of physical problems, you are overtraining, too. If I have to do a seven fret stretch, I'm going to find another way to play those notes.

Stephen Grey said...

Yeah, I've been overtraining like a mad fiend. On the weekends I usually do much more than 12 hours out of 48.

Right now I have a sock tied around the guitar neck and I'm going to go really really easy on the fret hand and instead practice scalar and arpeggio tapping and other right hand stuff. My only symptom is a slight pain in the left palm that just started happening but there's a tiny taint of numbness to it so I'm going to go real easy for a while. If it doesn't go away in a week or less, I may very well buy plaster bandages and put it in a cast for a month. A friend of mine has lost his ability to play guitar completely because of tendonitis.

There is a new body of theory about inflammatory conditions that claims that pain is not just a symptom but also a cause, meaning that there is a positive feedback loop between pain and inflammation.

"Pain signals originating in arthritic joints, and the biochemical processing of those signals as they reach the spinal cord, worsen and expand arthritis, the researchers say.

In addition, the researchers found that nerve pathways carrying pain signals transfer inflammation from arthritic joints to the spine and back again, causing disease at both ends. "

http://www.livescience.com/health/080930-pain-arthritis.html

Makes you wonder about other places where such feedback loops might play a part.