Philip Hii – guitarist

In most things in life, there’s a basic underlying principle that holds the whole thing together, a critical element that seems insignificant until you remove it, and then you suddenly realize how crucial it is to the entire structure.

It’s something we can call the ‘cornerstone principle.’

As it so happens, just such a principle exists in guitar playing too.

It has to do with when you release your effort after you pluck.

Do you do it at the point of impact (with the string) or do you do it after the impact?

For many people, releasing the stroke at the point of impact is a completely natural reflex, they don’t think too much about it.

As soon as they pluck the string, their finger automatically relaxes. It’s the same reflex that tells us to relax our grip on the hammer as soon as we hit the nail too, otherwise we could seriously injure ourselves.

Yet I’ve found that sometimes, this perfectly natural reflex can be superseded by other concerns.

I was not immune to its effect either.

I was a free-stroke player for many years. When I first started playing rest-strokes, I found the technique unwieldy and clumsy. No matter how hard I practiced, I was unable to match the light effortless rest-strokes of my teacher, Karl. Unfortunately, Karl was not much help. He was from the old school and didn’t believe in saying too much when he taught.

So I was left to my own devices.

It took one year of experimentation and practicing before I realized what my problem was.

I was focusing too much of my attention on the ‘resting’ and not on the ‘plucking.’ In other words, I was making the ‘resting’ the target of my stroke rather than the ‘plucking.’

To clarify, there’re two main parts to a rest-stroke, the plucking and the resting on the next string.

Instead of focusing on the plucking, I was slamming the finger onto the next string because I was so focused on ‘resting’ my finger there. The plucking was occurring almost like an afterthought, something that I happened to do on my way to the resting.

Let me explain with a small exercise.

Pluck the g string with the i finger. Focus your effort on resting the finger on the next string.

When you hit the string, don’t relax your finger. Instead, keep it going toward the next string to rest on it. In other words, make the ‘resting’ (on the next string) the target of your stroke, not the plucking.

Because you’re not relaxing the finger on impact, the stroke will feel heavy and tense, as if you’re just slamming it against the next string. The unreleased tension in the finger will also make it much harder to execute with precision at high speeds.

Now try it this way.

Pluck the g string again with your i finger. As soon as you hit the string, let go all tension in your i finger, allow the finger to relax instantly.

(It’s important to emphasize that the plucking and the release should occur simultaneously – the moment of impact (the plucking) must be the moment of release.)

And let the finger follow through to rest on the next string. Allow that motion to occur naturally.

When you play this way, you’re making the plucking the target of your stroke as opposed to the resting. As soon as you’ve accomplished that target (plucking the string), you automatically let go all tension in the finger and allow it to ‘rest’ on the next string as an aftereffect of the stroke.

The sensation is quite different in this stroke. You will feel the release in a very physical way and it will feel much more relaxed and controlled.

The rest-stroke is not the only place where we can misplace the target of our stroke, it also occurs when we overemphasize the follow-through in free-strokes.

As I mentioned before, the follow-through is a natural part of the plucking action. It’s something you don’t want to suppress, but neither do you want to exaggerate it too.

The reason is that when you focus too much on the follow-through, you shift the target of your stroke from the plucking to the follow-through. This means that you will not relax your finger on impact with the string, instead you will continue it toward some imaginary point in the palm to effect the target of your stroke, the follow-through.

The result is an overly tense, heavy and less precise stroke.

The great thing about focusing on the plucking is that it not only produces a more relaxed stroke but it also increases precision. That’s because we tend to hit with greater precision what we focus our attention on – if you focus on hitting the string, you will hit it with greater precision – this is another crucial point but it’s for another post.

The point of release in a stroke may seem a small insignificant detail but like the biblical stone that the builders rejected, it is the cornerstone of an efficient and relaxed technique. I know, I had to learn it the hard way.

When I was a student in NZ, I worked in a deli on Dixon Street in Wellington one summer –  as a cook. My job was to cook spare ribs and make the salads.

On one of my first days on the job, I was given a big slab of pork ribs. Without thinking, I reached out for the cleaver and started hacking away at the meat.

Hearing the commotion, the boss, Martin, came into the kitchen. When he saw the mayhem, he motioned for me to stop. Then taking a small paring knife, he showed me a white part of the meat, right between the bones, and sliced right through it.

Effortless mastery.

It was one of my first lessons in life virtuosity. Sometimes you don’t have to hack your way through life. Take time to find that sweet spot and you’ll be able to slice your way through effortlessly.

These days, whenever I find myself stymied, I ask myself if I’m using a cleaver again to solve life’s many problems. And often, I find if I just take a little time to figure out the situation, I can usually find that sweet spot where I can slice my way through effortlessly again.

A few years after the incident, I was doing a masterclass in Malaysia and I happened to mention that episode to the students as a way of explaining virtuosity. After the class, during lunch, one of the students mentioned that he had heard the story before. I thought he was mistaken, I had never told that story to anyone before. Then another student said yes, he had read about it too in an old Taoist text.

After some prodding. I found that the text was the book of Chuang Tzu, one of the earliest Taoist texts. I didn’t think too much about it until a few years later when I happened to stumble onto the book (in a translation by Burton Watson) in a bookstore. I quickly searched for the story and sure enough, there it was, the story of Cook Ting.

The similarities were striking.

With one small difference. Cook Ting took nineteen years to learn how to carve the ox, I took two minutes to learn how to carve the spare ribs.

Why the difference? Well, besides the obvious difference in complexity between the two tasks, (an ox has a lot more places to cut than a slab of ribs), I had a master butcher teach me where to cut, Cook Ting had to learn it through trial and error.

The tremolo is a particularly tricky technique to master.

To play it well, you have to play a perfectly even stream of notes with three different fingers on one string. Add to this the gap caused by the thumb-stroke and the problem of masking it, and you’ll see why the tremolo has often been called the true test of a guitarist.

In a sense, the AOV was written for the tremolo. Everyone of the principles contained within it is essential to mastering the tremolo.

There’re several problems associated with playing the tremolo.

The first is that of speed. To create the illusion of a smooth continuous tone in the tremolo, you’ll have to play those notes extremely fast.

You achieve it with the principles of looseness, lightness, fluidity and economy. Each one of these principles is crucial to attaining speed.

First, looseness. To get the relaxation needed, you need to be extremely loose in your fingers, hand and body. There must be no sign of tension anywhere. A loose body is like a well-oiled machine that’s operating with minimum drag and resistance.

Second, lightness. You must move so lightly it feels almost as if you’re not exerting any effort. Again, pure common sense – the less effort you exert, the faster you can move.

Third, fluidity. Your movements must be smooth and continuous. There must be no break in the flow of your finger movements. This enables you to maintain the momentum you need to create that self-propelled engine I wrote about in the AOV for Guitar.

Fourth, economy. There must be no wasted motion in your finger actions. Wasted motion means wasted effort means wasted time.

When you have these conditions in place, you’ll find that speed will automatically result.

But speed is only half the picture. You’ll have to play with enough force to make the notes speak clearly and audibly.

The key to doing this is in the principle of release. This enables you to effortlessly capture the power inherent in the string. I’ve written about this earlier in my post on power.

To briefly recap the technique, first pull the string lightly, feel the springiness in the string and then release the string. Let the release be a complete letting go. The finger should relax completely as it releases the string.

It’s important to mention that because the notes in the tremolo are occurring so fast, the pull and the release will occur almost simultaneously, they will feel as if they’re part of the same motion.

There is one more crucial element to the tremolo and that’s rhythm, another key component of the AOV.

To play the tremolo evenly, you’ll have to produce a steady stream of notes all evenly spaced apart. This is a rhythmic problem but unlike the other more common rhythmic problems of keeping time, this is something you can’t control consciously. The speed at which the notes are occurring precludes that. What you have to do is develop reflexive control in the fingers, make them play at perfectly timed intervals unconsciously.

The only way to achieve this is through practice, doing the tremolo over and over until the fingers learn how to do it automatically.

I’ve included a few exercises in the AOV for guitar to help you develop this unconscious control but any tremolo exercise will work. Just keep on doing it over and over until you feel the fingers relaxing and beginning to adapt themselves to the strokes.

For your practice to be effective, however, you’ll first have to put in those basic conditions described in the AOV first – looseness, lightness, economy, rhythm, release and fluidity.