🌳 Plant or don't plant? — the right-hand debate
One of the oldest disagreements in classical guitar pedagogy. Worth airing it out. 🎸
When you play an arpeggio — say a p-i-m-a — what do your right-hand fingers actually do?
Three broad camps:
- 🌳 Full planting — all fingers land simultaneously before the cycle starts. Maximum stability and clarity. Trade-off: the strings already "owned" by waiting fingers can't ring.
- 🌿 Sequential planting — each finger lands the instant the previous one plays. There's almost always one finger touching a string. Trade-off: more demanding to coordinate, easier sustain.
- 🍃 Minimal/no planting at speed — useful as a relaxation drill at slow tempos, deliberately phased out as speed increases. Trade-off: relies on highly trained motion economy.
💬 Where do you actually live in your playing?
- Which camp matches what you do most of the time?
- Has your approach changed over the years — and what changed it?
- Different planting approach for different pieces? Why?
This isn't a vote — it's a conversation. The fact that great players disagree is the point.
14 replies
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I guess #3 for me. "no planting" is pretty much indistinguishable from sequential planting at speed. I might use full planting if it's PIMA once and done. The training is needed anyway, since planting is useless for a PAMI or AMIP arpeggio.
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I always plant, unless I have a reason not to. For me, planting is really important for security on stage, for both hands.
For left hand preparation I use full and sequential preparation as well.
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I'm trying to learn a version of planting, planting with thumb when mostly treble notes are playing, and also when learning a piece to work out the chord structure and practice changes.
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Hi, et all!
I think that the right hand approach must be
1) note by note
2) according to desired tone, volumen, articulation, accentuation, tone consonant, tempo desired, voicing development and other stuff
3) never constricted by what what's easier or more difficult to do technically
for me, it's clear that the closer the finger is to the string when attacking the note, the closer the finger is to the moment of initial tension to perform the movement and so, the sound attack responds in a tenser way the closer the finger is. On the contrary, the more further the finger begins the movement, the more relaxed and inertial the attack results, because you have time to completely relax the tension of the impulse way before the finger hits the string.
So, it CAN be a technical decision... because many passages ARE effectively more solvent with planting but it can never be a decision made solely on what makes the passage easier. I'd say, I prefer making it harder and having it sound my way than the other way round.
And I have had the feeling for many years now that guitar players have all more or less the same sound (quite boring) and I attribute that in a great way to planting and "minimized" right hand movements in the seach of security and speed.
So, I'll use both and decide note by note, passage by passage. But as a general rule I prefer the one that allows the notes to ring most, because our instrument is soft enough already without having to stop resonances that could remain... this is a summary of how I approach the matter... hope it contributes in some way!
Greetings to all!!
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Although says the debate over planting is an old one, I first encountered the technique after joining ToneBase a few years ago. Certainly, when I was learning guitar as a kid (in the seventies, in Canada) none of my teachers so much as mentioned the term. Moreover (if I am recalling correctly) planting is not mentioned in any of the well-known guitar method books of the 19th century (Sor, Carulli, Carcassi, etc.). Of course, it is possible that planting was practiced during the romantic era, but that no one thought it worth describing in any detail. In any event, I don't employ planting in my own playing. I have in recent years spent a little time learning how to execute it, and I can see how it might be useful in some circumstances. But I don't in practice use planting in my own playing.
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For me, its a great big depends! Left to my own devices, I would say that I tend towards minimal/no planting, especially when I am playing at a faster tempo. If I am practising my arpeggios at a slow tempo, then I am more at sequential planting, which is the method I learned when learning how to play arpeggios. Interestingly, I recently signed up with a Premium+ coach and he is having me practice using full planting when the opportunity arises to gain stability. Need to practice this more before making any conclusion on full planting.
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The current vocabulary for planting didn’t exist or wasn’t in common usage when I first started playing but the technique certainly was. My first serious nylon string teacher was a flamenco guitarist, Ron Radford. He described it as “playing from the string”. When I started it was important to me for right hand stability and for learning proper tone production with the free stroke. I still teach full planting for ascending arpeggios to beginning students for the same reasons. Later the idea of sequential planting is introduced but soon after, if the lessons of stability and tone production have been internalized it becomes a non-issue. For myself, once in a great while I take one of speed-demon etudes (Villa Lobos 1, Brouwer 6, etc) and go through it a grass growing tempo to make sure the mechanics of sequential planting still work – then I forget about it until next self-exam time.
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Only if rolling a chord.
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Coming from the steel string acoustic world, and being relatively new to classical, I do minimal to no planting. I only plant if doing exercises. And I might plant when going extremely slow and just learning a piece. But then it's flying finger after that, good, bad or otherwise. 😄