Posts by Ethan Kind

This ebook, An Alexander Technique Approach to Classical Guitar Technique, is published on this website in a PDF format. It is very detailed and practical, and it will give you the physical tools you need to take the limits off of your ability to create the accurate guitar technique you want without sacrificing your body.
This ebook is also for sale on all AMAZON websites in a KINDLE format.
Located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, U.S.A. (MOVEMENT THERAPY)

Accuracy, hitting the right note effortlessly, is a function of knowing which note you want to play, and absolutely allowing it to happen, and trusting it to happen and expecting it to happen. When I found the book New Pathways to Piano Technique by Luigi Bonpensiere, I had found what I needed to play like a musical prodigy at age twenty-five.

The book revealed to me that if I knew where I was going on the guitar, trusted my finger or fingers to hit the mark, and moved instantaneously, I couldn’t miss, and I didn’t! It is an incredible feeling to leap across the neck of the guitar with total abandon, as quickly as my reflexes will take me and nail the note. I’m not talking about close, but truly landing with a precise landing, so that the sound is clean.

Now, the guitar does have frets, and we pluck the strings, and this can make for some pretty imprecise playing on the guitar. What I mean is that once the guitarist plucks the note it begins to decay, and if he does a large position change trying to make sure he doesn’t miss the note, he will cause a break in sound between the two notes, because he isn’t moving reflexively. (This break in sound isn’t always perceived, as it would be on a bowed instrument, because on a bowed instrument you would hear the wrong notes in between played.)

Reflexively is my term for moving as quickly between shifts as the arm can move the hand. This speed is limited by the speed of our reflexes, so I call it a reflexive movement. It is simply moving as quickly as we can in a shift, and we can’t move any faster than we can move. A whole lot of musicians don’t understand this and keep trying to force the arm and /or the fingers to move faster and faster. All this does is cause tension that makes you move even slower and exhausts the arms and hands.

If you are going to play the guitar with total faith and allow your hand and soul to hit the mark with absolute precision like a prodigy does, you are going to have to ACCEPT that if you know the note you want to hear, YOU CAN’T MISS! I see absolutely no difference between what a singer does to sing at pitch, and what the guitarist does to place a fingertip with precise placement on the string on the exact right note.

So, now it is time for you the guitarist to do what I did, so that you can do what I do (paraphrasing the founder of the Alexander Technique, F. M. Alexander). Sit down with the guitar and make a decision which two notes you are going to leap between on the same string, making it at least a fifth. Now play the lower note, and then after a moment instantaneously shift the left hand to the next note without thought or hesitation. Did you hit the right note? If you didn’t, then you aren’t trusting the note in your head to place the finger.

Withdraw even more effort to get it right, and then move instantaneously again, trusting the hand and soul to hit the mark.