I have a simple approach to teaching technique. I always offer the student my concepts of fingering, stance, hand postion, angles, height of Stick etc. with MY reasons for such decisions. If someone's anatomy doesn't fit these ideas, we adjust from there. If a student gets the job done and is efficient without injury, so be it. I always compare to guitarists who wear their guitars differently concerning height and angle. Also athletes .........basketball's Shawn Marion's shot is silly looking, and hasn't underhanded freethrows worked for some. Baseball batter's stances are all different and work for different reasons. Bowlers? There's a guy who's killin' everyone throwing the ball with two hands. I mean come on now.....
Bottom line when I teach-- "Here's how I do it and why". "If something else works for you....."
There is no one way to do anything in life, (dare I mention sexual maneuvers). I won't.
Sincerely,
Tex Apport

Thanks, Brett,

I get a fair amount of initial resistance to this approach from guitar players who come to the Stick. It's certainly a different feeling, as far as what you're doing with your hands, so I understand where they are coming from. It should feel different. Hand motion is a completely different technique from what they're used to.

But I have to say, if you can implement the hand motion in both hands as the driving force behind the music, rather than a typical "typing" motion for fretting, the payoff can be huge, especially having to do with hand independence, but also with tone, groove (as you mentioned) and dynamic control.

Having listened to students tell me their #1 issue is hand independence, even among those who have been playing a long time, it seemed like the most productive avenue of teaching would be to focus on the basic physical technique, and find those elements that are specifically related to that. What I taught at the seminar is a direct result of concentrating on independence training.

There will always be skeptics for any new idea, I can only continue to teach it and refine it based on the results my student are getting.

Though it might seem like it, because we're both passionate about how we think people can get into this instrument, I'm not arguing with Steve, I respect him as a player, musician and fellow teacher. But there's no denying that there's a big difference in how we approach the instrument. Just as there are many ways to learn other things, there are many ways to learn the Stick.

Emmett's recommendations in Free Hands about three fingered melody made sense to me, even though I was giving up my thumb and pinky from keyboard playing. I gave it a chance and I think it was a good move. No regrets.

Similarly, I'm just encouraging people to give my approach a chance, especially at the beginning, where a truly new technique that comes directly from this new playing method can be a strong foundation for musical discovery.

If it doesn't work for them, that's cool, at least they gave it a chance before shooting it down.

I start editing the instructional DVD this week, I don't know why I thought that would be easy...

I see that for some people, playing with the right hand seems easier than they thought it would, and I join that club. It just amazes me.
I come from bass-guitar instead of guitar and as said, I experience the same thing.

But it makes me wonder : why does a right handed guitar/bass player fret the notes with the left hand ? Was the original inventor of the guitar right or left handed ??

Cheers,
Bas.

Hi Bas,

I always thought that because instruments where a string is held with one hand and activated with another come mainly from folk music traditions, and the rhythmic function was the more important one, so the strong hand got that job, as most people are right-handed.

It wasn't until the past few hundred years that the left hand's job got to be as busy and important as the right's.

I may be wrong about this, of course, but I haven't found a better explanation

When I started classical guitar when I was 8 I was surprised that my right had seemed to have a less complex job than my left, until I saw the difficulty of that job.

The way I look at it, in guitar, the left hand's job is almost digital - on/off fretting the notes, whilst the right hand is "crafting" the notes - analogue. I know it's much more subtle than this, and I agree with Greg, that the rhythm is the key to it all.

Remember too, that the artistry of an orchestral sting instrument comes from the bow hand, not the left hand. And in classical music there really aren't any left handed string players. I think the reason for that is more visible (it looks cooler to have all the second violin's bows moving in unison). Bowing is sooooooooo much harder to learn/teach than fingerings, even when intonation is added in.

Brett

Well, I sorta have some different opinion here I find pertinent to voice at this time. The argument that the 3 finger technique drives you to move your hand along the instrument or helps your development to learn the instrument is not, in my opinion, exclusive to the amount of fingers you use to play. Moving your hands to explore new tones, different scale possibilities, etc. is a good practice in any stringed instrument that overlaps certain section of each string’s tonality to another string. In other words, if you play with 1, 2 all 5 fingers of your hands, it is a good recommendation that you move around to explore your possibilities, even uncrossing hands if needed, etc. For certain arpeggios, patterns, open-pentatonic, string-jumping licks, chord-voicing examples, there will be no effective way to execute them with an atrophied/unable/un-exercised pinky.

Now, I find the 3 finger technique an extreme limitation, as it was originally recommended by Emmett. I have to give it to him, he came up (within a relatively short period of time) with a new instrument, manual, website, strings, pickups, and another 100 original ideas, and he evolved from most of them, as you can see in the evolution of the product along the years. If you are not Django Reinhardt, I believe (whatever hand size you have) that you should develop each possible resource that gives you reach notes, phrasing options and other ways to draw your music in an instrument. Any pianist, violinist, bassist, double-bassist, guitarist has different degrees of difficulties with the execution of their instruments, and have rarely seen any recommendation around not using a specific finger… quite the opposite, anatomical difficulties are often surmounted with specific exercises to develop your abilities. Simple proof of this is that with 4 fingers you can do things that you can’t with 3, but the opposite is not true.

Why exposing this argument a little bit more emphatically, which in general is a matter of taste/opinion, now? Because of the small group of people playing the instrument, some of us (especially Greg) have evolved to have a great degree of influence regarding recommendations, techniques, ideas, to the point that a small suggestion, once is repeated multiple times, (i.e.: “No dogma, just explaining how 3 fingers works for me, for those who might want to give it a try..”) becomes “mainstream”. All of the above is said with utter respect for the work that Greg has done, is doing, and will do as a musician and a teacher, as I recognize the effort required to be a musician and make your way with this challenging instrument. One the other hand, listening to your own records Greg, I “hear” how exponentially your playing would benefit of both pinkies (again, with heartfelt all due respect), and I get to also “hear” on other players how that simple recommendation becomes their “way of playing” and on the long run, will eventually limit them.

For the overall benefit of the species and further reflection, I salute you,

Gustavo

Gustavo, I'm sorry you think I'm leading people astray. If I were to follow your reasoning further, we should all start learning with our thumbs on the board too, and just forget about how the hand works, as a device capable of great subtlety and control, nimbly coaxing beauty from vibrating wires. My approach is all about the hand, and actually has little to do with the fingers, which is why I don't "need" the right hand pinky (for most things).

Perhaps when my DVD is done, you can check out the basic movements I'm talking about and see if it isn't somehow different form what you tried when you first attempted 3 finger melody (I'll wager that is is different, but only you will know that for sure)., or come to a seminar to get the concept in person. I will likely be doing one in upstate New York later this year.

In the meantime, take a look at this video:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5TZi0qKzKCM[/youtube]

Compare this approach to most of what you see most tapping musicians doing with their left hands.

The answer to why I need to use three fingers in the right hand is all contained in this video.
Because I want to use all of these capabilities in my left hand my instrument has to be in this position. I want a big fat, grooving and full-sounding left hand, with ringing notes, like what I hear from a piano or a guitar. This is not what I hear coming from so many tapping musicians.

How does the right hand relate to the left? Two ways.

1. With the instrument in this position I simply can't use my 4th finger on my highest melody string comfortably. I don't have a long pinky or particularly large hands. The only way I could use my pinky equally with my other fingers would be to lower the neck angle (which kills many sustaining chord capabilities of the left hand) or to play uncrossed (which kills hand movement altogether)

Also, with the instrument in this position, I can hold my root tones much more easily while simultaneously adding other notes in above them, because my arm is free to change its angle, thereby facilitating a wider variety of relationships for the hand to the board, without a lot of finger bending. This makes it possible for me to add notes in my left hand that others would have to do in the right.

2. Because the frets are spaced further apart and the tuning spreads the scale out to 4 notes per string, the left hand on The Stick is a natural conduit for hand movement along the string. I'm not saying most people use this movement as a technique foundation. Most of them still use a kind of typing motion to activate the notes (just watch any of the hundreds of videos out there).

What I teach is not, "shift to the new position and then fret the note", it's "shift to the new position while you fret the note with one unified motion." It's like learning how to dribble a basketball. It's fundamental. and it's astoundingly powerful. You should try it.

It's really not as easy to implement with 4 fingers all lined up in their own frets, especially as the frets get closer together, but as I said in a previous post it is possible (and Brett, who has actually been to one of my classes, and is a dedicated 4-finger player, and a teacher himself made this point)

Since you're not playing this way I completely understand why you don't get what I'm talking about.

I want that same freedom of movement in my right hand that I feel in my left. When I use 4 fingers for diatonic melody, it feels like it's in a box, when I use 3 it feels more like the left hand, which is very comfortable moving around the board, and has lots of room, even with 4 fingers on a string.

So I can use the same basic reflex of hand movement along the string in both hands as the driving force to activate the notes instead of a "digital" up and down typing motion,

or to put it another way:



This applies to tapping with both hands, and it's a big reason why I believe in hand movement as the foundation of basic technique, instead of the common "typing" fretting motion we see so often.

I prefer "crafting notes" as jpow112 says, which is much easier with hand motion. I want music with more power and soul in it.

If that's what you think is lacking in my music, I'd love to read your suggestions about how adding a finger will improve my music "exponentially," as you put it.

I do use my 4th finger for some things....just not for flying around the board with the greatest of ease. For that, I use three, and I'm totally happy to share how that works with anyone whose interested.

A challenge for you:
So if you can play some melodic line you think I can't execute with three fingers, make a video of it please and provide the notes on a page, I'll do my best to learn it, and if I can't then I'll concede your point as far as what's possible with one hand is concerned. But we have two hands, and I can do a lot more at one time with my left hand placed more vertically than someone can if it's not.

Back to DVD editing...skeptics fire away, you're just helping me write a better script and better lessons. and for that I thank you.

Approaching the problem from another angle, playing existing pieces written for another instrument, I believe I've come across just about every permutation of melodic motion that you could ever think of using. I agree with Greg's assertion that almost anything can best be played with three fingers.
Two not uncommon exceptions:
Leaping to a high note on the highest string, and
A run of mostly half-steps which would lead you too far away from a desired playing area, or cause you to run out of strings.

I use the pinky a lot when playing two voices in one hand, so mine is relatively well-developed...but it's never going to be the equal of the other fingers for strength and precision. For parts in a single voice I don't use it unless that's the only option.


Mad Monk.

edit: Talking about the right hand only...the pinky subs for the ring finger all the time in the left.

I'll throw my 2 cents in. I started learning with a 4 finger technique. I have since switched to a 3 finger technique. I observed a couple of things starting out:
1. I found myself fixing on a position more, resulting in less hand movement and overall attack. I mention attack because we all know this instrument has such great opportunities for percussive variables, playing 4 finger lines seemed to result in a more unified , but, less expressive/percussive approach.
2. Because I had less hand movement , I felt my phrasing was more confined or less interesting; to my ears anyway.
Of course that's not to say choosing a 3 or 4 finger technique will make you a better player, but it will definately influence your technique and possibly your approach to phrasing.

Disclaimer: Not sure it matters, but , I should mention while utilizing 4 fingers, I was mostly playing a 12 string. I since have switched to mostly playing a 10.

This debate reminds me of George Orwell's classic Animal Farm and a line from it. "four legs good two legs bad." I wonder what they'd say about fingering a stick ?