In trying to describe my own sensation of Stick playing, I come back to the openness of the hand as it reaches across the strings, over the board, allowing complete physical engagement of the body in making music.

For those of you who feel like you can't translate your guitar and bass skills and knowledge directly to this new way of making music, I have a suggestion, though I make it at the risk of upsetting a few carefully stacked apple carts:

Drop your guitar and bass baggage and play with "empty hands".

Greg if I may interject,
Along with those empty Hands,a healthy Dose of "OPEN MIND"...
Since in Japanese Empty Hand = Kara Te(in Americanese it's Ka ROTTY)
Yes Stick Karate--more powerful than Elvis Karate..
Emtpy Hands-
Open Mind-
Tongue in Cheek-

Michael

I'm always fairly amazed at what you're able to do with those "empty hands" of yours, Greg...
One thing which I've often wondered about is the position of your left hand and wrist/arm, which appears to enable you to reach just about anywhere effortlessly and without any strain or stress.
I wonder if it would be possible for you to post somewhere some really close-up photos (or video ?) of your l/h playing position to show exactly how you're doing it, where your left thumb rests, how flat or arched your fingers are across the board, position of left wrist/arm and so on...?
(As a long term Carpal Tunnel Syndrome sufferer it's something I've wondered about a lot and experimented with a fair bit.)

I have been able to watch Greg up close and learn from his left hand and arm position. The first thing I learned was to move my arm. His arm is never in one position, it moves up and done all the time. This is documented in his book, "The Greg Howard Songbook" on page 68. He moves his elbow up and down to match the, "line of attack", as he calls it. This does a lot of good things and one of them is that he keeps his wrists straight. This was one of the major things that my physical therapists told me to do always when I was typing and playing, keep those wrists straight! Greg's approach facilitates that. Sometimes I see videos of Stick players that have their left wrists bent at 90 degrees and I wince in pain just looking at them. By really working on Greg's approach, I play with no pain now and I got better, too. If you have broadband I highly recommend that you take some video lessons with Greg. He can correct your playing posture very quickly and it really helps.

-Eric

Hi Eric, good call, thanks, I remember you talking about this in a previous thread and it's exactly this part of Greg's technique that I'd like to see illustrated in detail, with every aspect of it made clear, if possible from every angle, so to speak.
I don't have the Songbook and regrettably this PC (not even mine) won't run a cam on Skype - something about "drivers", or something like that... - otherwise I would have been going for those Skype lessons prior to this.
But I definitely hear what you're saying and would certainly like to know more. The whole arm/elbow/wrist/thumb/hand thing seems to be a really crucial point, and how those move according to what one's playing and where one's playing it. That straight wrist point in particular... describing it in words is one thing, but attempting to translate those words into technique without actually seeing it illustrated/demonstrated in close-up I find rather challenging and your comment about how you "see videos of Stick players that have their left wrists bent at 90 degrees and I wince in pain just looking at them, " suggests to me that I am not alone in that.

Hi Derek,

It's too bad you don't have skype possibilities as that's a really easy way to work this through.

I found two pics on your site that illustrate what I would suggest to you. Maybe I'm reading them wrong but this is what I see. It's a subtle difference but can have a profound effect.

In the first your instrument is "forward" and a little outside your shoulder joint:



The arm has to also be "forward" which causes strain in the left shoulder. The strap is taught so this tells me at least you are not supporting the instrument with your left hand, which is good.

in the second the instrument is inside the shoulder joint and looks like it's closer to your body.



This second position makes it easier to move the arm around to get the different angles. it looks like your strap has a little slack in it here, so maybe you're holding the instrument up a bit in this shot.

Maybe all you need to do is tighten the strap a bit to bring the instrument up just a little more inside the shoulder joint.

Give it a try and see if it doesn't make things more comfortable.

PS, thanks Eric, for validating my concepts as you do. I realize that there are many different ways to wear these instruments, so I can only try to explain how my approach works, and what it facilitates, especially in the context of making playing more comfortable.

Hi Greg and thanks !
That first photo of me is from a soundcheck, I'm probably about to kick the pedals to get them working... the second is from the performance at the same gig. It looks like it's possible that the position in the second is owing to me playing at the lower end of the fretboard and attempting to watch what I'm playing at the same time, something I'm always guilty of.
I always have the strap as tight as it will go, it's on the top hole at the moment - maybe I'll try to bore another one in it and see if that helps - I certainly find it easier to play some things with the instrument more upright.
Yeah, not having my own PC or access to one which will support video on Skype is a drag - maybe I'll be able to afford one one day... (...and if I do I'll set about making some more recordings with it, long overdue...)
Actually, I'm still very keen to observe just how exactly the elbow/arm/straight wrist thing works for you, I've tried to fathom it from existing videos of you and threads about it here and there, but there's something I'm not getting... how arched or flat your fingers are above the fretboard, whether or not they are principally moving from the knuckle joint, how and where your left thumb moves exactly... guess there's no really adequate substitute for watching you play at close quarters.
19 years and a good many performances and recordings later and I'm still wondering about really quite basic and fundamental stuff like this... perhaps it's more to my credit than otherwise ? I'll hope so, anyway...
Many thanks again !

Hi Derek,

I'm getting my little studio reconfigured right now to make producing little demo vids much more easily, so you can count on some of the kind of thing you're asking about soon.

Everybody has different ways of playing, my goal is just to convey how the method works for me (what else could I honestly teach?), so I appreciate your questions in that context.

It's easy to become too full of yourself when advocating one's own point of view, I always feel humbled and inspired by questions like yours. They are a great opportunity for reflection. It was a question from Randy Clare and Matt Tate at a seminar in Vancouver many years ago that put me onto this path of exploring the mechanics of playing rather than just telling people where to put their fingers, which was a big part of how I used to teach.

That said, it would be folly for me not to recognize that there are lifetimes of musical achievement by musicians who use Emmett's playing method, but who take approaches different than my own. Still I've worked consistently in more different and varied contexts than many have (solo, duo, band), and I've played many different styles of music (rock, jazz, Latin, experimental, folk). The technique elements are the consistent thread that runs through it all. So I'm happy to share them.

Hi Greg, I really appreciate your reply and am certainly looking forward to any new vids that you make.
I generally subscribe to the idea that it's important for musicians to constantly deconstruct and analyze what they're doing, in as much fine detail as possible, I guess that's what keeps me going right back to basics and always questioning whether or not things could - or perhaps should - be done in ways other than the ones in which I am doing them, and the CTS has been an added incentive to do so with regard to my l/h in particular.
Yeah, I know there are some great players out there who hold the instrument at a more relaxed angle or who use other techniques seemingly quite naturally which I find difficult, but you're the one who talks of the "mechanics" of playing (with the hands not just the fingers, moving of the whole arm, angles of wrist/arm/instrument and so forth) in a way that causes me to think that (as Eric seems to point out above) your study, experience and advice on these matters could be of great benefit to a lot of us. As does your playing, which also speaks quite adequately for itself.
Whatever it is exactly that you're doing is obviously working - it intrigues me greatly and I want to know and see in more specific detail just precisely how it's happening - if I can succeed in perceiving what you're doing then it may help me in perceiving what I am (or am not...) doing - well, that's my hope, anyway.
And I'm sure I won't be alone in saying "thanks for sharing!" on these subjects. Looking forward to seeing/hearing more !
Thanks again.

This is a BIG issue for me. If you pick any picture of me, you'll probably see the 90 degree left wrist. As I've mentioned before, I sometimes have it bent long enough that my hand loses blood flow and falls asleep . This never happened when I played 10-strings; only on my old Grand and current SG12. I guess bending the wrist is sometimes the only way to get my small hands all the way across the board. I do seem to have the Stick less vertical than most players I see, so maybe that's contributing to the problem. I'll try to get it more vertical and see what happens. I just know I can't go on like this!