Posture

I haven't posted in years, so I thought I'd post something new.

I'm still playing the guitar of course.

My latest focus has been on posture and how I hold the instrument. I realize that I hunch quite a bit and tilt the guitar upward. Neither of these are good habits, so I'm working on correcting both...which of course means relearning lots of things!

Gitâr

I haven't posted in a long time, but I was thinking it would be nice to post something about the connection between my posture and my playing.

With that in mind, I went back to the blog to discover that the last thing I posted was also about posture!

As long as I'm here, I should post something, so here goes. I've had a bit of trouble with my wrists the last few weeks, nothing big, but some soreness, so I've been taking it easy. Usually, I play a lot over the winter holiday, but because of the wrists, I've been holding back. It's the end of break and the wrists feel pretty good now.

Oh, and the title of this post is in Welsh, because Welsh is iaith y nefoedd, 'the langauge of the heavens'.

Strumming

I had sabbatical in the spring and then summer break, so lots of time for guitar, working out, research, hanging around the house in my jammies.

But now I'm teaching again in a few days. I'm looking forward to the class, Statistical Natural Language Processing, but I'm not looking forward to less guitar and exercise.

I think my latest epiphany is a "re-epiphany": don't strum at an angle. I think I tend to slump over the guitar which leads to sloppy strumming. I just notice the strumming doesn't sound so good, but I don't know why. It's always the bad habits though, the ones we think we work ourselves out of only to find them back again.

A new one

I got a new (used) guitar!

It's a Seagull "Entourage Rustic Grand", a small parlor-body guitar. Diane bought it for me as an early birthday present when we were passing through Phoenix a week or so ago.

Picture to the right. Light-colored wood, cherry-laminate body. I love it! It's definitely not something to strum a lot on, doesn't have the bass of the dreadnoughts, but for plucky things it's super fun. The neck is a standard length, but slightly narrower. I think the standard nut is 1.75 inches and this is 1.72.

It came with a soft case with backpack straps, like the travel guitar. My plan is to not keep it humidified in the case. Since it's used, it may very well never have been kept humidified. I'm not even sure how effective a humidifier would be in a soft case.

I'm on sabbatical this term and the plan has been to take one of the guitars out in the morning and keep it out all day, so while I'm working on things I can take little guitar breaks all day long. This has worked out quite well. I have a number of new pieces I'm working on and nicely sore fingers/hands.

Ar yr arfordir (on the coast)

I'm on sabbatical this term and my wife only has online classes, so we're taking a few days on the California coast in a little town called Cambria. We've been here a number of times: nice restaurants, quaint, but the main attraction is that we can afford to spend too much to rent a place where we can see and hear the ocean.

The reason this is relevant is that it's much more humid here than at home, humid enough that I can leave my guitar out of its case. (Our home is Tucson where it's way too dry to leave the instrument unhumidified out of the case.)

The other reason it's relevant is that, because this is a rental, there's lots of room to leave guitar, music, etc. out.

What I've found is that this really helps the practice. I find that I can wander back and forth between guitar and other activities all day long.

I'm thinking this means we have to find a way to humidify the house in Tucson?

Or I should just leave my everyday guitar out of the case all the time?

Hiatus

It may look like I've taken one, but not so. I just haven't had much of a chance to post recently. What's new in the interim? I'm still playing, practicing many of the same pieces. I've gotten hooked on the Welsh language, the most relevant aspect of which is that I can say guitar in Welsh: gitâr. My latest epiphany is that practicing the same things a lot, I find I get sloppy with my fingering. I went through a bunch of old pieces the other day just trying to fret them properly and was amazed at how much better they sound.

Plateau

Still working on Ode to Joy....seriously plateauing. I need to find something new and fun to play.

Sloppy fretting

I haven't posted in a while.

I was in Wales for two months and did manage to keep up my practicing there, but with less regularity than at home.

I was practicing the other day, working on Ode to joy in fact, and I realized that I am not as attentive to my fretting as I should be. I find that with nobody listening that I can sometimes fret a note pretty far from the metal. Anyway, I decided to really concentrate on fretting things carefully and was amazed at how much nicer several pieces sounded.

It's a fairly obvious point, but it just highlighted the importance of vigilance in my practicing.

Will the circle be unbroken

I'm working on a classic, done in Carter-style. It's got up-down strums all the way through. I tried it with only down-strums, but it definitely doesn't sound as good. This is taxing my limited strumming abilities, or at least it feels like it's taxing them. Something to work on.

Although I've now decided that pieces I master tend to lose their interest. That is, by the time I learn how to play them well enough and by memory, I like them less.

Schade.

Masters of War

An old Dylan classic. Really simple strum and chords: Dm and Csus2 (capo on 3). Nice

Going electric

I got a new guitar for my birthday yesterday!

It's electric!

It's a "starter" model, which is just right. I need to see if I enjoy playing electric before I go off an invest any money in a nice one.

So far, I see several things. First, it's wonderfully forgiving with misfingered chords. Nothing buzzes. Wow!

On the other hand, that fretboard is really narrow, so it's really hard to do anything fancy on the fretboard.

The strings are correspondingly close together, so it's hard to do any interesting fingerpicking.

And I find I have to be pretty careful with the pick, not to run into the pickups.

But it's really pretty....

Bad habits

I've decided that playing alone all the time--which is how I prefer it--leads me to perpetuate bad habits. I think I have at least these:

1. My timing is erratic and I should be practicing with a metronome.



2. My strumming seems to be based on getting the strum in the right place, rather than getting the right-sounding strum.



3. I fret the low e-string with the pads of my fingers, rather than the tips.

I'm sure everybody gets bad habits, but I think my solitary style reinforces certain ones.

Without

I've been without the nicer guitar for almost three weeks!

There's always been a little warp in the fretboard, but it's been so negligible, that I've been able to live with it for some time. I started working on a piece where I have the capo up on #4 though and it's really hard to avoid the problem then.

So I took the guitar off to the shop. They said they could fix it easily and have it back to me within the week. At the end of the week, however, they called and said there was a problem with the finish. Since it's a Martin and under warranty, no cost, but it would take another week.

That, however, was after we were due to be on a boat to Alaska, so I'm due to get the guitar back this coming week when we're back in Tucson.

The other guitar is perfectly serviceable, but I'm definitely looking forward to getting the d-18 back....

Help

O.k., I'm still on the plateau and I think I need some inspiration to get off of it.

What I want is new fingerstyle pieces (with tab!) that I can work on. I have a bunch of books with some pieces, but nothing that catches my fancy. Help.....

Change the strings!

I haven't posted in a while, but I have been practicing continuously.

I feel like I've been on a plateau for the last few months. I'm not sure what to do to get out of that. I think the best thing would be to pull out one of the stack of guitar books I have and get started on learning the pieces in it. What I feel most like learning now is something "strummy", but my impression is that those are the least clear from books.

Maybe I should just change my strings though.

The plucky ones

A few months ago, I started a new book with lots of fingerstyle pieces. I've nailed down the two or three that I like and want to know by heart, and started pulling out some of my many other books to find one with pieces that would be fun to work on.

I found one in the stack that I used to play from all the time that's all about Celtic and American flatpicking fiddle tunes. Real nice. There were a bunch that I used to play and that I'd marked in the book and it's been fun going back to these, finding my fingers almost remember them.

There are a few new ones that I've gotten hooked on and those are fun too. I'm noticing that my "guitar memory" seems to have improved. That is, I seem to be better able to memorize lines at a time. I'm also noticing that I'm more comfortable playing tunes with a greater fret range. Where previously I preferred the tunes where I could pretty much anchor my left hand, now I'm much better with moving the left up and down the fretboard.

Dead strings

I realized today that when I play strumming songs, that I occasionally have damped/dead strings. When I'm fingerpicking, these are easy to spot and fix, but it's harder when strumming.

Buzzing strings are easy to catch with either technique.

I'm always worrying about the "quality" of my strumming, and I'm thinking now that unnoticed damped strings may be part of the problem.

Second time around

I haven't posted in a while, but practice has been going pretty well.

I've been focusing on memorizing a finger-style piece that had been a problem for months. I'm about halfway through now. Slow going, but it's working.

I did have a little epiphanette the other day: when I go through my practice routine, sometimes pieces are rough. I'll occasionally go back to play them and they're typically much cleaner the second time through. It could be because I've simply already played it, but I'm thinking now that it has more to do with focus. The first time round, I'm trying to get through the whole repertoire; the second time through I'm focusing on just that piece.

Yet another strumming epiphany

My practice schedule has been off lately as I'm in the middle of dealing with a kidney stone. All should eventually be fine, but the moral of the story is: keep hydrated!

The strumming insight, which is really a continuation of one from two posts back, is that I realized that when I strum, I now hit all the strings that I'm supposed to. I think that's actually wrong though. It sounds lots better if I pass over or only lightly graze the bass strings (making sure to hit all the treble strings per two posts ago).

Now I could just be imagining this. Or it could be an effect of playing a "boomy" dreadnaught. Or it could be a huge new step in the right direction.

I'm hoping it's the last.

In the dark

I was practicing the other night at dusk working through a piece I've played for some time. It was getting dark, but I didn't want to get up to turn on the light. I realized that some pieces I play by looking at my right hand, other piecies I play by looking at the music, and others I play not looking at anything.

I realized this because the particular piece I was playing seemed to get worse as I got darker; it was one of the pieces I need to look at my right hand for.

Some of this is based on familiarity. There are pieces i know really well and I'm used to playing them without looking at anything.

Some is technique. I find that I generally have to look at my right hand more if I'm playing with a pick, perhaps because I'm less sure of the location of the pick, than I am of my actual fingers.

I guess the oddest thing is that for the pieces I play without looking at my right hand, it's not a good idea to actually look, it makes my playing worse. That is, if it's a piece I can now play without looking at my right, looking down actually causes me to stumble.

In any case, it was an interesting realization that turning the lights on or off will help and hinder playing different songs.