{"id":6611,"date":"2015-05-10T21:44:01","date_gmt":"2015-05-11T04:44:01","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/?p=6611"},"modified":"2015-05-10T21:44:01","modified_gmt":"2015-05-11T04:44:01","slug":"your-guitar-dna","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/your-guitar-dna\/","title":{"rendered":"Your Guitar DNA…"},"content":{"rendered":"

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s… mainstream guitar players were really good.<\/p>\n

\"iStock_000003493212XSmall\"On the blues end we had guys like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Gary Moore, while even on mainstream radio you would hear amazing guitar work by Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi, Randy Rhoads, and tons more.<\/p>\n

It just happened to be a time when technical guitar was more “in style.” And, as often happens, it was followed by the pendulum swinging hard back the other way in the early 1990’s with the sounds of grunge and bands like Nirvana and Soundgarden who pretty much threw technically demanding guitar right out the window within a couple of years.<\/p>\n

Now I’m not here to pass judgement… music has been going through cycles like this for hundreds of years and I don’t see that changing in our lifetime. It is what it is and as an armchair historian I’m enjoying watching the current resurgence of more technically proficient guitarists in the mainstream right now. I’m old enough and involved enough now to be aware of it and to enjoy watching it happen.<\/p>\n

But all that has little to do with my article today… except to give you some background on where my head was at as a teenager struggling to play like my heroes who, at that time, played some really difficult stuff (and this was the age before transcriptions were so readily available so not only was it hard but we had to figure it out by ear!)<\/p>\n

So, like many people then and now, I relied on material I could mail order, or later get from VHS tapes of “Hot Licks” or REH Video lessons from\u00a0guitarists of the day.<\/p>\n

\"ADNAnd the more I studied with a variety of private teachers, and learned from various correspondence methods, the more I realized that we all have a certain “guitar DNA.”<\/p>\n

In other words, there are certain things that are just easier, or more difficult, for some people. Teaching really brought this into focus, but the internet has shown it to be true even more for me.<\/p>\n

Let’s take a BIG example first: picking.<\/p>\n

The “right” method was always what we now call strict alternate picking. No one taught me this so for a long time I just picked in the way that felt natural.<\/p>\n

Problem was… I saw Paul Gilbert play lightning fast with strict alternate picking so I thought I had to do it the same way. I spent about a year beating my head against that wall until I saw another video where Frank Gambale told me it was permissible to “sweep” my pick across the strings the way I always did naturally anyway.<\/p>\n

Within a few weeks of back to my old ways I made more progress than the previous 12 months!<\/p>\n

Or how about this one: never hold the pick with your middle finger of your right hand, only your index finger and thumb.<\/p>\n

Well… even I preach this one. Why? Simple, because in my own students I’ve never seen anyone benefit from doing it with the middle finger and I’ve seen it be detrimental to many.<\/p>\n

So imagine how shocked I was to watch Eddie Van Halen on youtube flying across the strings holding the pick between his thumb and middle fingers!<\/p>\n

In college, I used to play a lot of flamenco guitar – I even played for a flamenco dance group on occasion. And in flamenco there is a thing called the continuous roll where you go between each of the 4 fingers on your right hand and then you start over.<\/p>\n

So each finger goes down across the strings and you use the back of your fingernail – index, middle, ring, pinky, index, middle, ring, pinky, etc.<\/p>\n

I couldn’t do it… and still can’t. But guess what? I figured out that I could use just my middle and ring fingers and go both directions and get an identical sound.<\/p>\n

And no one I’ve ever taught has been able to do it my way… it’s a fluke thing. But it’s part of my “guitar DNA” so I can do it easily.<\/p>\n

So here’s the point to all this…<\/p>\n

There are a lot of accepted and “standard” techniques when it comes to guitar playing. And they are there for a reason… because for most people those accepted and standard techniques are the best options starting from the beginning.<\/p>\n

But you’ll rarely see me insist on any particular technique unless I’m watching the student in person and can see a compelling reason to change what they are doing. If they are getting the right sound and doing it in a way that feels comfortable, I figure it’s part of their “guitar DNA” and works for them. And who am I to judge that?<\/p>\n

The trick, of course, is knowing the difference. You might think you’re doing something in a way that gets the right sound, when in reality your ear is playing tricks on you and really something needs to change. So always do your best to know what the rules are, or what is considered standard and “correct,” before you go off doing your own thing.<\/p>\n

If you’ve tried the “right” way without success but there is an alternative that just works for you then I say go for it. Technique is a means to an end, not an end unto itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When I was growing up in the 1970s and 1980s… mainstream guitar players were really good. On the blues end we had guys like Stevie Ray Vaughan and Gary Moore, while even on mainstream radio you would hear amazing guitar work by Eddie Van Halen, Jimmy Page, Tony Iommi, Randy Rhoads, and tons more. It […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6611"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6611"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6611\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6614,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6611\/revisions\/6614"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6611"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6611"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bluesguitarunleashed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6611"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}