My first “professional” gigging happened started in summer 1994 when I joined up with Reggae Ambassada, serving SE Michigan playing Bob Marley hits but also more contemporary dancehall styles as well as a good quotient of soca (“Hot Hot Hot”) and classic calypso. It was around this same time that the jams my friends and I were having were getting a little more serious. I was in a nebulous space between “playing my electric guitar for fun and exploration” and “playing my guitar for a job.” I realized I needed to start making an effort to get better.
To play electric rhythm guitar parts one needs to have a very strong and steady up and down motion with your flatpick, both in playing chords and single notes. You need to develop an absolutely even flow with no greater energy on the downstroke than the upstroke – everyone starts playing guitar by mostly downstroking, so upstroking especially on single notes is awkward at first. You start with playing one note on one string, down-up-down-up-down-up-down-up-down-up… slowly, then faster. The desired action is not with your wrist. Hopefully you have a metal dude around in your life to show you the action is in keeping your wrist stiff and working from the elbow.
If you can maintain a smooth diggadiggadiggadigga on one note you can then try go back and forth between two notes maybe 4 repeats on each note, then three, then two, then downstroking one and upstroking the other. Keeping it dead even. The metronome now becomes an essential tool. Start slow, find a tempo you can play to while making a good sound, build speed. After leveling up to simple 3 or 4 note one-string melodies, the next step is moving between strings, starting with going back and forth between two strings, maybe 4 notes at a time, then 3, then 2 then a new string on each stroke until eventually you can flow through a full 6 string arpeggio with consistent up and down strokes.
The reward for the commitment to unwavering up and down stroking comes next, for the next step is adding spaces. Think of a flow of down-ups as a repeating a 4 note cell, DUDU, repeated over and over but with no accents, like a stream of water. Then subtract one of the notes, start with the first, so now it’s _UDU and in the flow you are now playing _UDU_UDU_UDU-UDU…etc. And then try with subtracting the second: D_DUD_DUD_DUD_DU…etc. Then the third: DU_D and then DUD_.
The spaces are equal parts of the rhythm. Without concentrated practicing your inclination would be to follow each downstroke with an upstroke no matter what. But when you hit a “rest” instead of a note you don’t reset your arm pattern – you play two downstrokes consecutively with an imagined upstroke inbetween. For music making this is how you get it in your body, into your Operating System, that downstrokes are downbeats and upstrokes are offbeats. Your muscles will learn this before your brain does. You play through the spaces, the “rests”, by “not playing the note” in a micro-movement of the pick all while not breaking your steady arm motion. So much rhythm guitar is about playing the spaces, using mechanical binary motions to create presences or absences of equal value. If you can become deft at it you can become someone who stays in the pocket of the groove no matter what else happening – most importantly you get to experience what that feels like, and after time and repetitions you don’t have to concentrate and you can break free of thinking about technique.
The most exciting phase of these technical exercises is adding accents, emphasizing specific pulses in the rhythmic cell. The accent might be satisfyingly at the beginning of the phrase, or an accent may more mystically pop out of the middle with a herk and a jerk. In soca music you hit the chord on the upstroke a 16th note after the downbeat and it makes ya jump, in bossa nova you accent just before to make you chill. The accents and spaces are what define rhythmic figures.
In most popular music you might hear there is the tempo of the melody – the length of the notes you sing, while in the background you may hear drums and percussion playing quicker notes underneath. These quicker notes are creating the floor upon which the melody dances and usually are organized in sets of 4 or 3 (or 6). At this level you get into the real digital binary: note or no note; accent or no accent. And this is where the quantum codes are formed, the atomic structures of music. If not heard, then felt. You don’t think about the rules of sentence structure when you talk but they are there and in just the same way there are deep grammars to music in its rhythmic cells. Some are simple elements, your Hydrogens and Nitrogens, ever accessible as the beat of your heart. Others are simple powerful combinations, like mixing “D _ _ U _ _ D _ ” with “_ _ D _ D _ _ _ “ that are the foundations of life, your H2O and NaCl. With increasing complexity practical applications diminish, but occasionally discoveries can be made.
Anyways I discovered I really loved practicing this stuff and feeling the results. I picked up all sorts of books to better my flatpicking speed and strength.
The goal at the time was to play really smooth bass bubbles in reggae music. As a lone guitarist in four-piece reggae band (guitar, bass, drums, keys) I would move back and forth between skanking/chopping chords with the keyboards and then “bubbling” the bass – playing with the bassist doubling the bassline, giving it a top treble edge and then rolling in and out of notes here and there for sonic variation. When you get into reggae music history you can hear the evolution of the guitar parts in the rocksteady era of the late 60s. As short melodic basslines became more foundational to the essence of the music at the dawn of early reggae a guitar became a kind of a bass ornamentation (a “full” reggae band would have two guitarists, one that chops and one that bubbles). Dropping rapid flutters of notes around bass riffs sounds simple on the record, but it can easily come off as a clunky distraction if you don’t do it right. And it’s easily overdone. Over time I got pretty decent at it, but it definitely took a lot of conscious effort just to solve that one little motif. And I got used to the ritual of “technique exercises” as a warm up before I started playing.
My solo guitar technique training began with Roberto Arce in that first day of Latin Rhythms at The Old Town School with my brand new nylon string guitar (a requirement for the class). He showed me the concept of a “rest stroke”, using the tip of your finger, ideally with a bit of nail, pressing down on a string in a way that it would then fall to and rest on the string behind. And then the basic action of alternating your right hand index finger (“I”) with your middle finger (“m”): i-m-i-m-i-m, the same logic of disciplined alternate picking with a flatpick I would do on electric guitar.
Exponentially more physically challenging than flatpicking, I needed reps upon reps on this to develop my hand muscles to be able to play smoothly and make nice sounding music. There are a nice variety of sounds that can be created with a pick, but nothing like the range of sound, good and bad, that two fingers can do. I needed hours and hours and days and weeks and months and years of reps to have any sort of consistent control over my tone.
I would get home from work, get super stoned, put on a baseball or basketball game, and then do i-m-i-m-i-m… nonstop for the length of the game. Maybe just one note for 15 minutes and then two notes and then working up to scales. Like the Karate Kid waxing cars, I was teaching my hands to play guitar.
Putting yourself in the arena as a “classical guitarist” can be quite intimidating in terms of the expectations. The only other guitarists people have seen doing these sorts of things are in films or videos, or perhaps from traveling to Europe. Thus the only point of comparison the public has to what you are doing is inevitably going to be from the greatest guitarists in the world, or via YouTube, the greatest guitarists of all time. My hope was always to be booked by people who hadn’t spent much time with that.
In Spain there are music academies where kids enter to start classical guitar training at 7 years old. Alfonso himself started at around 7 learning guitar from his father. When you learn the instrument that young it becomes part of your intuitive sense of communication. Like immigrant children who blend the language of the new country with the old creating a “creole” with deep grammar and nuance, while the adult parents at best learn a “pidgin” form of the new language, which can communicate ideas but without following the deep rules of language. You can imagine now the stereotypical “bad English speaking immigrant” who confuses verb tenses and uses odd sentence structures – with the accent it can be charming and even poetic, but they don’t possess the full language in its full complexity and full capacity for expression.
On a nylon string guitar I could maybe aspire to be “charming and even poetic”, but starting at 32 years old virtuosic fluency would never be in reach. But how close could I get?
Of course the real leap for this even to be a consideration was not until I met Alfonso Chacon. With Arce I was learning stumming patterns and the ability to play melodies with two fingers so the class could play together as ensemble. When Alfonso came in as a substitute, he brought solo guitar.
Alfonso was a brilliant teacher in terms of repertoire and style but he was so far beyond thinking about technique himself that he wasn’t much help for me in that regard. He gave me a few tips and some introductory exercises but it wasn’t what we spent our time on together. I had to catch up on my own, treating my hands as an engineering problem to fix, a new yoga practice to create.
So I began to dedicate at least a third of my practice time to technique drills – hand stretching exercises, finger independence exercises, hammer-ons and pull-offs (aka, “legatos”), and speed drills. I found a great technique book by Brazilian guitarist (by way of Uruguay) Isaias Savio, teacher of a young Luiz Bonfa, written in the 1940s with all sorts of unique scale and legato exercises which became my bible.
Around 2010, after now years with Alfonso as well as his ensemble, Los Guitarristas, I realized I had been overemphasizing my index and middle fingers at the expense of my ring finger (known in classical guitar lingo as “a” for anular), so I began a dedicated program to work on strengthening it. To make this happen I started working with exercises utilizing an “a-m-i-m” finger pattern, “ring-middle-index-middle”. Just like with the flatpick, beginning with playing on one string at a time, and I quickly concluded that this was the most efficient way of balancing the strength of my right hand and the most efficient/least taxing method of playing fast notes, as long my fingers don’t start tripping over themselves which they are want to do.
I searched more technique books for that magic bullet “perfect exercise” for my right hand ring finger. In one book I found a very cool exercise which involved cycling finger patterns between two strings using four note patterns, one note each for a-m-i-m. But in an inspired twist I noticed that the author also put accent marks emphasizing third note, often counterintuitively with the melodic phrase and what the fingers wanted to do. Using capital letters as accented notes the finger pattern looks like this: “A-m-i-M-a-m-I-m-a-M-i-m”, and you get that A M I M pattern in the accented notes while the a-m-i-m bubbles underneath, pretty neat.
The four note patterns started with the first note on the top string and the subsequent three notes on the second string. Accented or not, your brain hears that top string note like an accent, so when the accents cycle through hitting the duller lower notes the phrase starts to sound totally different, even surprising. A pattern of four at the same time a pattern of three.
It was my formal conscious mind introduction to polyrhythms, pretty much the atomic foundation of music that feels good to the body and makes it want to move.
Of course I had been playing polyrhythmic ideas for years but I didn’t understand it in the abstract, they were just parts I played that seemed cool. And suddenly I could start to hear my own repertoire in entirely new ways, and I could think about creating new music in wholly new ways.
I’ll be writing more about my polyrhythmic education over the course of this blog, but what happened here is the real start of the development of my personal voice on solo guitar. Doing these exercises on the lower two strings I could imagine each string as a drum – a bass drum (6th string) and low tom (5th string), or maybe two heads of a pair of conga drums, one pitched a bit higher than the other. I could now think about what I was doing as not playing guitar, but playing drums.
So in the early 2010s I put away my guitar technique books and started buying drummer books, Latin percussion books, learning the polyrhythms and clave patterns that are the basis for Afro-Cuban music (which extends into Brazilian samba, Argentine tango, reggae, calypso/soca, dancehall and reggaeton, New Orleans funk, and entire universe of continent spanning Afro-Andean folklorica and the electronic club music of today) – rhythms I understood only in so far as what strum patterns might work with them, now I could understand them intellectually as a path to understanding them bodily. Even if my brain processing speed can not always hear them in real time my slow ass analytic brain can use them as tool to create original music ideas.
I created my own host of exercises exploring atomic strength rhythmic molecules (aka “clave” patterns) all while working to strengthen my right hand ring finger. During the madness of the pandemic I even wrote and posted a guitar treatise on Slideshare with an introductory slate of these exercises for any guitarist interested in exploring conscious polyrhythmic playing. For the curious it’s available here.
https://www.slideshare.net/slideshow/right-hand-polyrhythmic-technique/239409746
The concept of “my fingers are drummers” has been the main driving force of my practicing for the past 15 years. Around 2015 I realized to truly inhabit these ideas I needed to actually play with a drummer, so in preparation I began to re-learn my repertoire with a drum machine. I was then fortunate enough to have met percussionist Janet Cramer, who was educated and skilled in Afro-Cuban and Brazilian styles, and for a couple years we gigged as a duo. It was hugely transformative for me.
First, just the torque on my arms, hands and fingers required to tonally stand up to conga drums threw my body for a loop. Through force of pure excitement I gained the strength to play loud and hard against live drums, but at the end of a set I would not be able to pick up a glass of water with my right arm. And I developed a muscle soreness that ran from my right shoulder all down my arm. Fortunately I found a brilliant intuitive body worker while searching for a sports massage therapist who helped me work through the knots in my arm muscles, including some cupping which was fun. I was transforming from one kind of guitarist to another.
But ultimately it also exposed my weaknesses. Janet was a very forgiving percussionist but I could still knock myself off the rhythm sometimes when my hand patterns would break down, especially from fatigue. And then to really make the concept work I needed to learn to break out of my arrangements to get into compelling improvisational spaces. I had more work to do.
UP NEXT: 4. Enter the Garden
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