Office hours revelation

Had an ”crackingthecode”-giving moment with @Troy This thursday…

A small sentence about to focus on my connection points opened up my ability to play some things that i’ve struggled with before…

It states the problem with fenderstyle Bodies that’s curved in the chapter but I didn’t realize the importance it had on my technique.

Xclnt!

2 Likes

Ha. This may be another example of the guy on the webcam being more persuasive than the guy in the pre-recorded video, even when they both “try” to say the same thing. What was different about the live presentation that made things clearer?

1 Like

I think it stood out more, verbally, than in writing. Written language is sort of a monolog whilst same topic in a dialog tends to gravitate towards the sum of what both parts want to discuss. Or just luck! IDK Helpful at least! :grin::+1:t3:

1 Like

I had a similar experience to Johan’s. For me the thing that made it clearer was having your eyes on it. I thought I had it right, but it was immediately obvious to you that I didn’t.

There are so many visual cues that you’ve trained yourself to notice that are lost on us laymen. We can’t separate the signal from the noise.

1 Like

I’m not really sure what Johan is referring to. What’s the problem w/ fender style bodies? Which curve? As a strat player primarily, I’m curious.

The forearm contour makes you want to put your elbow behind the plane of the top of your guitar, which introduces some flexion in the wrist, which makes for a forearm rotation motion instead of a wrist deviation motion.

1 Like

Behind the plane of the top of the guitar? I might need a diagram, lol. Are you saying that the contour makes you play more over the “center” of the guitar’s body whereas you should be coming from the back, near the strap button?

Yep, your wrist is intuively straight with a tele/LPstyle body, but on a contoured body you easily compensate the forearm resting angle with wrist flexion (unintetionally) which troy Speaks against in the pickslanting primer. And above This i Also switch my Palm connection points playing on different strings.

Oh damn, @Johan_Runesson I think you just opened something up for me! I was definitely playing too much over the center of my guitar instead of bringing my arm in from behind the strap button and coming in more parallel to the strings. I tried adjusting my arm more parallel and it already feels better! I’m dumb for not realizing this :slight_smile:

1 Like

I thought the reveal would be something like “Troy is actually [insert name of famous person that makes this joke funny for you] in disguise”, but this is also cool :slight_smile:

In the first photo the elbow in front of plane of the guitar’s top. Notice the position of the wrist this creates. In the other photo the elbow is behind the guitar more, and it creates a slight flex to the wrist.


2 Likes

Interesting. How did you fix this? Did you correct at the wrist or did you change something else and the wrist fell in line?

Troy called my flexed wrist position “collapsed Gypsy” and we just got to work on doing some flexed wrist Gypsy-ish DPS/USX lines.

Then we shifted gears and —like Johan—we got the contact points right, which shifted the elbow like Ryan discovered (coming in from more around the strap button). I’m still spotty on this—I can’t just drop into it consistently & effortlessly. And so far I only have it for UPS/DSX.

2 Likes

Firstly (on my behalf) it was good information - just to be aware is step 1. Normally I would just lean my arm against the body and go. Now I start by positioning my hand with full contact palmwise with a decently straight wrist and let the arm adjust for that. Secondly, maintaining my contact point regarding the palm regardless of which strings I am playing makes the pick angle consistent and a 2stringed lick is more easily transferred to other strings. Before I shifted my palm anchoring depending on which strings I played: aggressive gypsystyle for the treble, something more neutral in the middle and another for bass. This was problematic when doing runs from E to E just because I wasn’t aware of it. Playing Eric J-style licks was easy because you maintain a UPSX style all the way, but when doing 3nps this isn’t really helpful.

1 Like

ahhh yes! This is exactly what I was doing wrong. I was coming over the top of the guitar in an even more extreme angle than the first picture and my wrist was more pointed downward. By coming in more parallel from the strap button area, my wrist is more parallel also and the movement feels more natural. Thanks for the pics!

1 Like

You’ve all seen these photos and instructions, right??

1 Like

That in combination with the link provided in Office hoursinvitation is what I am referring to.

Thanks

Ah, this is all so very interesting because I had the same hunch all along but I didn’t quite know how to verbally express it.

I had the same “problems” with my LP vs Strat that I thought were due to differences in scale length or some other less correlated factor but I did eventually conclude that the lack of neck angle and the body pitch made it initially more difficult for me on the strat.

However, as I wanted to play it on the strat, I think by accident or pure trial and error I found a way to adjust and incidentally I found the cure was more counterintuitive than I thought: less intentional muting with the right hand, picking closer to the neck joint, and more exaggerated (but correct) mechanics for me. The discrepancy now feels much less than it did back then but boy was it quite a thing back then, especially since I had played mostly shorter scale guitars with heavy neck angles and bigger bodies.

1 Like

I do office hours for my Physics lectures and often get questions where I think “hey but this was already in the notes/lectures/textbook”. I am starting to think this is totally normal/physiological in the teaching process, and there may be no way to avoid it.

Teaching is tricky because once you know a thing, you sorta forget how it was to not know the thing. So even stuff that for the teacher seems repetition of the same ideas for the 10th time with 1% difference in wording may finally give the “aha!” moment to the student.

That being said, I have the impression I still fail to get the message across in many cases, so it seems you are doing a much better job here :slight_smile:

4 Likes

There’s a whole psychological phenomenon/cognitive bias known as The Curse Of Knowledge.

2 Likes