Philip Hii – guitarist

I’m aware that some of the ideas espoused in the AOV may sound strange, perhaps even radical in concept.

Such as the principle of creating the automated engine, the idea of walking your fingers, the cornerstone principle of focusing on the plucking etc.

It’s not my intention, of course, to try to be different. I’ve never believed much in gimmicks because they wear off very quickly.

No, this is just the way things are.

Because, the truth is, the virtuoso reality is quite different from normal reality

For example, in normal reality, if you want speed, you would try to move faster.

In virtuoso reality, that’s inefficient and ineffective. The better way would be to tap into the energy in the strings and use it to catapult your fingers from one note to the next.

Catapult? When was the last time you saw that word? Lord of the Rings?

Precisely. But that word describes perfectly the sensation in my fingers when I play a series of fast notes in a scale. There’s no effort involved, just the sensation of letting the fingers fly from one note to the next, the sensation of one finger propelling the next one forward, like a catapult.

Or in normal reality, when you want more power, you simply apply more force. Not in virtuoso reality, where if you want more power, you apply less force, and you reap that power by releasing more energy.

I know this may sound like a bunch of mumbo jumbo and I would understand it perfectly if that’s what it sounds like to you. But the benefits of this mumbo jumbo are very real to me, as in when I play a fast scale or a tremolo or an arpeggio.

As I said earlier, the virtuoso reality does not follow the rules of ordinary life. I encourage you to try them out in some of the ideas on this blog and in the AOV and AOVgtr.

It’s a lot more fun and rewarding, and you may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

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.