And here I was, thinking I'm sounding too legato and maybe I should sound more staccato like all the videos I see on YouTube... good to know that both are valid and I should practice both.

But it is so true that certain movements are much more easily achieved using staccato.

I have to disagree. If you use hand movement as a basic technique strategy, then all moves are easily played legato as well.

Melodies are made up of three types of movement,

1. scale-based
2. intervallic
3. repeated notes.

If you use hand movement, all three of these have the potential to sound the same. Without hand movement, repeated notes will always be staccato, and intervallic movements outside of an individual playing position will also always sound staccato (unless you use a slide).

Starting from a baseline of consistency is the best way to ensure that your musical intent comes through in your playing, and you are not always at the mercy of your technique.

I feel the new material taking shape....thanks...keep it coming

To me there is NO question as to the advantages of Greg's hand movement techniques.

I always recommend following this method for all beginners. In fact I always recommend trying the 3 finger technique for a good long time as a beginner.

So why do I use 4? Shapes/fingerlings are nearly impossible for me to learn so I borrowed the 4 fingered scales I knew from bass guitar (don't make the same mistake)

My main questions are


1 Can you incorporate Greg's movement techniques into a 4 fingered technique?
I have some success in this but its harder than with three
2 how easy are these techniques for beginners?

Ps I think the example you sited might have just been a clam
I will always make lots of clams.......... I will sit down with it later to see if I think it may be a movement driven clam (that sounds gross)

Brett

Hi Brett,

1. to your questions:

It's harder to do, especially when the frets get closer together. The main difficulty is the "desire" to have a 1-finger/1-fret scheme. The other problem is the inconsistency of fingerings from string to string.

As I mentioned, the 3rd finger is a bit of an orphan with 4 fingered melody:



The position is clearly outlined by the 1st and 4th fingers, so as you transition from string to string there is a clear opportunity for hand movement. The thing you have to work on is getting hand movement into the half-step transitions between the 1st and 2nd finger.

Looking at this pattern from a 3-finger technique perspective reveals that
3-finger players have to work on this as well:



My goal in all of the exercises I write is to get the hand comfortable with real-world situations. The most common of which are covered in the warmups on page 2-1 of The Stick Book, Volume 1. Make sure to use a slight amount of hand movement for the half-step transitions on the 2nd line of the exercise especially.

There is a clear example for this at 4:45 in the following video, though the amount of movement is small it's important so that you don't have separate techniques for half-steps than for whole steps when using the same two fingers. :

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVNNUHKZWLw[/youtube]

Since you are using four fingers, make sure you practice the 3rd to 4th finger transition in the chart above with hand movement as well. This will really strengthen both and make that middle line of the chart more seamless.

For blues and pentatonic play the 1st and 3rd and 1st and 4th fingers form natural position boundaries in a fingers-only approach.

The first step to expanding beyond the 4 finger box might be to make use the 2nd and 3rd fingers for the higher-pitched pentatonic boundaries instead.

2. As far as the difficulty of beginners learning this goes, it's always harder for bassists and guitarists to get this movement concept, because they are so used to fretting only with finger joint motion as the means of tapping. But it's not impossible. And some guitarists I've taught had no trouble with the transition.

It might even help in developing the language of the two instruments independently to have a radically different vocabulary of movements, but that's a theory I would have no way of proving.

Does that make sense? Thanks for the questions.

I had no idea that one flippant comment on my part would spark such a discussion...

Greg - I always appreciate hearing you elaborate on the technique. Some things I know I struggle with:
- I think that I have an easier time with intervallic motion and repeated notes. Maybe scale-based movement is harder because the movement continues in the same direction? Somehow it feels easier to alternate opposite movement.
- Getting the left hand more legato, considering there's more distance to travel.
- Legato playing when playing chords.
- Getting that 2nd finger to cooperate, you mentioned that as a common issue.

Yikes, off to practice…

-Claire

Claire,

I think you are making fantastic progress in your playing. We can deal with the issues you raised in a lesson context.

But all of these things have something in common. Most players tend to divide the larger movements up into 2 moves

a. shift the hand
b. tap the finger

They need to be combined into one very quick move to make that left hand more legato.

Think Gene Kelly vs River Dance. (The hand movement choice is the Gene Kelly here )

Very nice explaination. Great charts. I know this idea can seem confusing, and I'd just like to add: don't overthink it too much. Just get the feel of it, and then get all technical. Just my thoughts, not that my technique is ideal but in a zen state I try to really feel the sensation of 3 vs 4. But try to not think like a stickist or guitarist if thats possible.

Very well put Greg, I love the dance analogy

How about something like Abby's video, but with camera angles and notation aimed more specifically at Stickists?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?annotation ... FasiPE8tGs

BTW if anyone knows about more videos like this I would love to check them out

One of the things that really jumps out at me here is the way it isn't explicitly positioned as either an introductory or intermediate curriculum. Hand motion is obviously a really fundamental aspect of playing that's important to consider fairly early on, but once you get it down, the benefits of Greg's approach really do continue to emerge as you move along to more sophisticated forms of practice. There's some explicitly beginner content at the very beginning -- terminology, instrument position, triads, etc -- but for the most part the contents of this DVD are quite widely applicable to Stick players of various different skill and experience levels. My first suggestion for bonus material would actually be a more explicit mapping of between chapters and the skill levels at which you'll still need to revisit them (although yes, these are necessarily blurry lines) -- a few would be beginner, some would be intermediate, and a fair number will remain useful in both contexts. Frankly there's probably a lot of advanced high-level stuff here too, but I'm always confused as to what even qualifies as "expert" on an instrument as deep as this one!

And while I hate to suggest even more video material for these supplements since the DVD already has a good two hours of lesson material with quite a lot of replay value, I do think a few ultra-close shots of the hands to contrast hand motion versus finger motion would be really helpful and set the stage for everything else. I'm talking, like, fullscreen, where we're seeing the dirt under the fingernails. In the hybrid video + PDF context Greg suggested earlier, these could also be paired with a couple static illustrations which intentionally overstate this dramatically -- giant white-gloved cartoon hands, perhaps? All this because if you're not used to paying attention to it, and especially if you're already an accomplished finger-focused player trying to dive deeper into Greg's more hand-focused technique, even distinguishing hand-driven versus finger-driven notes in your own playing can require a disarming degree of focused attention at first. You already get to watch Greg give demonstrations in almost every conceivable playing scenario over the course of the DVD, but small video clips and/or images that zoom way in -- to the exclusion of everything else -- and illustrate it with just the right hand and then again separately with the left might really drive the point home for anybody who didn't fully get it the first time around.

And finally, "I don't have much time to practice" is a fairly familiar sentiment on this forum, and one must assume it's even more common among the folks who are letting their instruments gather dust in a closet instead of hanging out with other Stick players on the internet. Practice material with an eye toward this problem is always going to have an audience in all the folks who have kids or other commitments or get frustrated too easily to put in a continuous hour with a strange new instrument. Greg's work on his Tap-Twisters ("like tongue-twisters for your fingers") has always struck me as an especially novel approach to the matter of teachers generating exercises for students. Similarly, trying to generate as much tangible beginner progress as possible from a short three-minute practice interval strikes me as a really productive angle. I realize that here I'm departing from suggestions that are inherently tied to the DVD material, but since visual illustration is always helpful and Greg covers a lot of fundamental material that will probably be easy to repurpose for something like this, a pairing of "first watch this portion" followed by "now play this figure" could work well.

Always new directions to explore...

Hi Vijith,

Thanks for all the feedback on the DVD and for the suggestions about supplemental materials.

One thing I've been enjoying about the skype lessons is the ability to show things from different angles, so I will definitely include more closeups in future presentations. I don't have a camera person, so setting up shots is a thought-consumptive process.

Having avoided written music in the DVD, I'm not sure about continuing to do so for future video materials, but I do like your idea of the animated finger symbols you posted about in another thread here. People seem to really like the animated beats in this video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qresoGB8Ryo[/youtube]

But not having explained the StaffTab ahead of time, I have to wonder if it just throws people off. There's been r real feedback on that aspect of the video.

Thanks again!
Greg