Technique and Tone

I had a student recently ask me, "is this the most important thing I should be learning right now?"

We were talking about pick technique in a very fundamental way: how to hold the pick, how to move to strike the string. This student was not a beginner and already able to play, so she obviously knew how to do these things already. There's so much time to devote to practicing to begin with, so I can understand her wondering why we were returning to something so basic.

If you think of when you first picked up a guitar, you probably didn't give a whole lot of thought to the mechanics of how you pluck a string - you wanted to learn play a song. And that's an appropriate mindset in the beginning: the desire and enthusiasm are the most crucial part, and the music is what drives it. Yes, you have to crawl before you can walk, but the sooner you get to making real music the more enjoyment you get from playing the instrument....let's face it, to most people there's nothing sexy about scales and finger exercises. All that stuff is a means to an end, and many students see mechanics and exercises as a necessary frustration they want to get past as quickly as possible.

But let's deconstruct a little. Let's say you can play the guitar, maybe not as well as you might like but you can get by. You have a vocabulary of chords, rhythms, and songs, and you might even be a seasoned performer. You know what works and what you can put across, but you also know there's more you could learn to do. So where do you go from here?

Everything we know how to do on the guitar is based upon muscle memory. We learn patterns and repeat them until the fingers go where they need to go on command. This is the way most people think of practicing, and there's no escaping this part of the process if you're trying to learn something new. But there's another aspect that I think gets lost easily, and it's based on one simple idea. Playing well means knowing what you want your hands to do, and having the ability to get them to do it...so we need to develop greater precision, not just more vocabulary. This is what technique is really about: not speed or flash necessarily, but control.

This control and precision helps your physical ability to make the guitar "speak": not just to make a sound but to produce the best quality tone you can. We'll define quality tone in terms of clarity, presence, and resonance....but all that really means is that the guitar sounds good. Good tone has mojo, that magical ability to transport the listener with a single note.

Tone comes from the way the string is struck....from a balanced relationship between force applied and sound produced. There's no magic formula to figure this out, just your hands and ears.There are lots of variables: the gauge (or thickness) of the strings, the thickness (and therefore flexibility) of the pick, the size and shape of the guitar, and the size and shape of the player. Every guitar is going to respond differently, and a sensitive and aware player can adjust accordingly. It's perhaps obvious but worth mentioning that the instrument needs to be "set up" properly so that it's not too difficult to play but can produce a good tone....for a beginner, lower "action" (height of the strings) and lighter strings can make it much easier to hold the strings down. The physical size and shape of the instrument is important too, you'd be surprised at how many people struggle with playing guitars that are too big for them. Keep in mind that if you feel like you're working too hard, it's very possible that you are.

When you pay specific attention to the mechanics of technique, it's going to improve your precision. More precise technique means better sound, which is at the heart of everything we do on an instrument. Getting into technique in greater depth helps you produce more and different sounds, giving you more options and more possible choices at any given moment. As a creative artist, THIS is the fundamental goal: options and flexibility. We feel stagnant in any situation when we no longer see options and possibilities....developing technique allows us to have more ability than we might use in any particular situation, so options stay open and other possibilities always exist.

So the short answer to the question is yes: this IS the most important thing you could be learning right now.