Unit 16 t ranslation

Your Hand is Your Band: The Importance of Fingering

After Jamey Andreas (www.guitarprinciples.com)

Do you imagine how good a band can be if the players are

Not sure which notes to play?

How good could their performance be if at rehearsals different members played different notes at different times? And yet, when guitarists practice, this is actually what happens for many of us. Very often, we are not really sure of which fingers we are using for each note we must play, and we do different things at different times. Or, we may use awkward fingering for something, because we never stopped to think, examine, and analyze what we do.

I formed my principles of teaching the guitar and the list now contains many items. The list is called "really basic things that every guitarist should fully understand and put into practice, but apparently, nobody is telling them, or they are just not listening."

The subject of fingering is one I would like to talk about now. It often happens that I will get a new student, who played for a while, and had lessons with another teacher. Many times I was surprised, in fact, shocked, to find them practicing things, especially rather complex things like classical pieces or fast rock licks on electric guitar, and they DO NOT HAVE ANY FINGERING OR PICKING WRITTEN ON THE MUSIC. In other words, the notes or tab are there, but the fingers to use for each hand are not.

Why is this important? Because the fingering is the set of instructions that your brain processes and follows when you play in order to bring about the results you want: namely, the right notes at the right time. If you do not figure out the fingering you will use (or experiment with), than you are, in effect, will make your practicing weak and ineffective because you will not fulfill the two conditions of practice:

Know the right thing to do to achieve what you want, and MAKE SURE YOU DO IT!

Here is the fundamental understanding you must have. When you train your fingers (and realize you really train your WHOLE body WITH your mind) to perform the actions necessary to get the result you want (the exact right movements at the exact right time) you must be entirely and consciously clear as to what those movements need to be, AND you must know, really know, whether or not you do those movements with each repetition during the practice process. If you do not even bother to figure out and write down the picking to a complex lick, or complex passage in say, a Bach fugue, then you a undoubtedly do something different with each repetition, and do something even slightly different just won't cut it when it comes to nailing things securely.

The only time you can get away without the fingering in your music is when the notes you play are parts of patterns that you already know well, and able to do automatically. Of course, the more we develop as players, the more patterns we accumulate. But if you want to continue to develop your abilities as a player, you must know how to deal with new and challenging material, and to CONQUER IT! And believe me, there are ways that work, and ways that don't! Don't be lazy.

Learning the ins and outs of fingering and picking takes experience, and analytical thinking. If you take lessons, ask your teacher about the subject, and always think in this way when you practice.

Whenever you have trouble with something, a lick or scale run or intricate finger style passage, ask yourself this question: do I know EVERY finger, on both hands, responsible for playing EVERY note (for pick style, substitute pick stroke, up or down, for the right hand). The answer to that question (the right answer, YES, of course) will very well solve that problem for you.

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NOTE:

You can play the guitar with fingers or using a pick(медиатор), a thumb pick (медиатор на большой палец).

You can also use slides or tone bars for some styles of music to get a clean, bright, cutting tone with great sustain (задержка звука). They are made of plastic, shell, steel and other materials.

P-I-M-A - обозначение аппликатуры при игре на гитаре где: P - большой палец, I- указательный, M - средний,

A - безымянный

Boom-chick-strum - приём игры "бренчание" в стиле country ("кантри").