This is what I’m saying. Everyone has a mechanical system or systems, and everyone’s musical choices bear some influence of that system. Vinnie’s lines sound like the kind of lines a player with his technique would compose. They do not sound like the kind of lines a gypsy-style player like Yngwie would compose. I don’t think that sounds like painting by numbers, but I can certainly hear that influence clearly. I love them both, and think they are both perfectly great at what they do.
Yes! And as you mentioned elsewhere above, that’s probably the most mind blowing aspect of all of this.
Tell a piano player that “guitarists’ melodic choices are largely dictated by how they hold the pick” and he’ll probably look at you like you have two heads.
The extent of it is surprising, but piano players have some sympathies. You can slide from Eb to E, or from Ab to A, or from Bb to B, for when you’re doing blues type licks in C, F, or G. But you can’t slide up to a black key for the same thing in A, D, or E. You need an extra finger for that, and sometimes you don’t have one! There are a ton of licks I only have in certain piano keys and not others. And plenty of keys where I got nothin’ at all! Improvisationally speaking.
1 Like
My favorite framing for the whole “one technique to play anything” discussion is time management. Yes, if you had unlimited time, you could master a single thing (e.g., alternate picking everything) that can get you arbitrary numbers of notes on a string at arbitrary speed, with all the right hand control that you need, and all that good stuff. And you can successfully push that technique into areas where it doesn’t want to go, like playing ultra-fast 1NPS arpeggios with alternate picking. But we don’t have unlimited time, so what you’re doing is investing some portion of your practice hours toward pushing this technique into areas where it’s going to give you less improvement per hour than if you just used something else.
There’s a certain conceptual elegance in using the same technique for everything. But ultimately you are still sacrificing hours to push a rock up a hill that it doesn’t particularly want to go.
Along with “your technique should let you play anything” often comes “you should practice your one technique until everything feels equally easy, even the stuff that wouldn’t normally come naturally with it.” Even if a part seems really hard, you’re supposed to keep practicing it with your one technique until it feels just as easy as anything else. Problem is, you’re just going to end up being equally skilled at playing everything–but still strictly worse at playing anything than if you had budgeted your time toward a range of techniques that are appropriate for the stuff that you want to play.
A much better approach is to always keep an eye on what kind of music you really want to make, and make sure you’re not letting yourself get boxed in by your own techniques. Play other instruments, compose parts by singing, just listen to new music, whatever. If your existing technique still works well to serve the music you are coming up with, then stick with it. If not, then don’t hesitate to bring in other tricks. If you always put the music first and you make sure your hands can do what your ears really want, then learning a range of techniques for different situations helps you, simply because it frees up more practice time to develop yourself as a musician across the board.
5 Likes