Let Me Hear Your Balalaikas Ringing Out

Playing Technique
#1

So maybe @Troy or someone could chime in on what motion mechanics are going on with the traditional Balalaika playing style.

It’s traditionally a finger style where the back of the index finger can do down strums. It appears to have common elements of the frailing style used in flamenco guitar or clawhammet banjo.

Everyone from the video game music post will recognize this one

There are probably better video clips but I don’t know enough Cyrillic to find them on YouTube.

Very cool instrument mine is tuned E E (same octave) A its like the lowest two strings of the guitar two octaves up. I can’t do most of the traditional techniques I sound like a combo of someone that plays mandolin and listened to too much yngwie when I play. :joy: Kinda works though as Russian folk music seems very minor key heavy. Fake it like EVH on Little Guitars

20231021_131220
20231021_1312201908×4032 697 KB

#2

I’m not 100% sure, and i’m not an expert at identifying joint motions, but to me the fast strumming sections in the clips you posted look like either elbow or some kind of forearm rotation (similar to the gypsy jazz picking/strumming mechanics) or a combination of both.

Motions aside, there’s some really cool playing there :slight_smile:

Thanks for sharing!

#3

The Tetris guy is elbow but for the other two, the fast strummy stuff is mostly reverse dart wrist. There’s a small amount of elbow but the big path being traced by the hand is similar to the Joscho Stephan and Roy Clark motions we look at in the YouTube lessons.

In the case of the awesome 7 year-old soloist, she’s also USX — you can see how obviously escaped the upstrokes are:

Edit: She’s still at it, and even more awesome now:

4 Likes
#4

They do this without a pick? How do they not have their nails wear down?

The nylon strings?

#5

Incredible! When I was 7 all I cared about was beating Mario 2. Child prodigies are something else.

#6

I think we’re all child prodigies, just the parenting/environment is different. As far as I know we all have a really high level of connections as a child and it gets pruned from there, so you can craft a kid to a specific subject, a language for example. Thats why it’s so hardcore important to treat children with a lot of respect and set them on the right path. Just like a boat, you set the course just slightly offcourse, it will be miles apart from the destination over time.

1 Like
#7

(Apologies as surely this has been covered on this forum) it’d be interesting to study how the string spacing impacts speeds. With more “room for error” would speed (finger or pick) be noticeably different?