%&%&%&^^&££$*()&$$$

[compagnito]

Greetings fom the Loon Capital, cor blimey me old chinas, me plates a meat are really frog an toad.

Picado technique, ugh - will I ever get it to be a natural habit, I thought I was making good progress, but it fell apart when I realised my technique is not perfect, or in other words, I tend to use the same finger twice, for string plucking that is.

All I can say is %&%*^$$^%*()**^$%^$

And as for tremolo, maybe next year.

[Section_10]

naaa just practice it slow and you'll see that you get better at it naturally. Trying to get good ruins it. I practice tremolo very little but i'm much better at it now, though i never tried to or play anything that even has a tremolo.

[hcrunyon]

Here's something I posted a couple of years ago, maybe in reply to a similar lament from the same poster:

I started flamenco in earnest seven years ago, at age 40-something, and picado has been a gorilla on my back the whole while. At first I had the same problem that you're having: reflexively repeating strokes with one finger or the other on string changes. I think I picked that up years earlier during an unschooled attempt to become a rock-n-roll bassist. Alternating strictly does help in the long run. The best way to progress, I've found, is to take your favorite exercise or "problem" falseta or what have you, and for a while forget about tone and speed. Play free strokes, not rest strokes, with the lightest possible effort, and at a slow-enough speed that you can have fully conscious control of your fingers, so that you're sure that you're alternating "correctly." I think you'll find that the new pattern of movement imprints itself on your nervous system more quickly this way. Once the new pattern is established--once you can play the thing "right" and with rhythm using free strokes at a slow tempo--then a day will come when you'll find you can add some speed with little trouble, and then you'll start feeling some confidence in your movement. Only then should you start playing the passage with rest strokes and trying to make a punchy sound. That step will set you back enormously at first, because now you'll be making a lot of small changes in the new larger pattern of movement, in order to make the rest strokes. Here you can't play lightly, since the task is to lean into the strings and find the dramatic force that one usually wants in a picado run. But be sure, still, to play slowly so you can control everything. Repeat as slowly as necessary to play it right, but many times. Don't try to add speed until you can play it cleanly at low speed with ease. If you're patient this will pay off.

To put it briefly: When trying to learn a new pattern of movement, always start out playing very lightly. This goes for alzapúa as well.

One other thing: Although TV and movie editors tend to dwell on the guitarist's right hand during impressive picado runs, left-hand technique is critically important to playing the stuff cleanly. The nearer you can get to "walking" your left-hand fingers so that only one is touching the fingerboard at a time, the cleaner and clearer your picado will be. I don't know why this is, but for me it's turned out to be very important.

Howard Runyon
Lake Placid, NY