The Right Hand dance

After Barney  and Mark posted their thoughts about tone changes I decided to do this elemental video to share some exercises I use to teach to my students as a "warm up" routine.

Actually, I don't think of them as warm-up but rather more as callibration or fine-tuning. I don't do "warm up" exercises in the traditional sense. I think movements on guitar are derived from very natural and already learned body movement possibilities and that the actual question is how we apply everything we already do, naturally and well, to guitar playing. It never made sense to me that to play guitar we had to learn to move (our hands, no less!!) in a way we have not discovered yet untill we reach the guitar. It makes no sense at all that to learn to use a human tool we have to develop something that we can not do as humans already. So, when we reach the guitar (unless we have just, say, woken up we have already used ou hands and there's no need to "warm them up". 

In my mind there is, yes, the need to fine-tune movements and sensations in the hands and in listening. And that really deserves a moment in practise, but it has nothing to do with playing scales or arpeggios or slurs or spiderfingers. It has more to do with slight differences in preassure, sensations upon contact with the strings, relaxation in every movement, breathing, availability of the articulations and such. 

And to this Post point, availability of articulations in the right arm is very important. We are told many times in present guitar pedagogy that right hand stability is very important and, of course, it is. But stability has nothing to do with stillness or immobility... and these are many times mistaken between. This misconception has been widen by "planting" technique that exacerbates minimal movement and has become the starting point of modern guitar technique all around. Of course, efficient movement is something to look for at all times, but efficiency must be always relative to expressiveness. Many times we are musically required to make more costly or demanding movements and if we reduce them in the search of doing less, music pays the price. 

Tone production and attack variety are the most common victims in the search for efficient right hand movement and it's become far too usual so see videos of extremely technically developed players with a completely immovable right hand playing very different passages or even pieces with very much the same sound. Of course, there are exceptions, as there always are but I think that we are at the right time in the pendulum swing to stop caring so much for stability and continue looking from the early beginnings of our teaching methods into a more coreographed right hand expression. 

So here are, much in the way of Ashley Lucero's LiveStream at Tonebase about LH tips (I recommend this as a MUST WATCH https://app.tonebase.co/guitar/live/player/gtr-left-hand-tips-never-heard ) some very simple and almost obvious exercises to start enabling RH coreography if you feel you are in need of it.

You can experiment on these and later apply them to which ever piece you are working on!! Let me know how it goes or if you have any thoughts about the exercises or if you have different ones that you want to share!! Looking forward to reading all of you!!