more scrittles

A few days ago I picked up my sheet music for the J.S. Bach "Chaconne" and started working through it again. I bought it almost ten years ago, and worked on it for a couple of years, finally getting through it though not with a lot of smoothness or speed. I haven't looked at it for a long time, though I often listen to a violin performance of it - it's an incredible, gorgeous composition, a great piece to play for someone who feels unmoved by classical music (but has some patience, as it's a fifteen-minute solo piece). As I went through it, it was nice to feel improved facility in a lot of the areas that used to give me trouble, like the fast sections with lots of slurs.

Yet as beautiful as it is, it just didn't capture my excitement. It ended up feeling like a distraction from my true work, a convenient way to avoid the tedium of harmony and scales that I know I need to remain committed to. Though I know it would doubtless be good for my technique to keep working on it, I think I'm going to have to leave it aside for the moment. Finally being in a situation where I'm able to play for at least a few hours every day, I feel obligated to make as much forward progress as I can, and it seems like working more on harmony is where the big work still lies.

I've been enraptured by triads recently. Not triadic music necessarily (though PJ Harvey has been getting a lot of play) but using triads to form the important notes of other chords. Mick Goodrick's "Advancing Guitarist" book was again the source of a lot of my learning here. It's just a great way to create a more interesting sound without needing the root (I usually leave it out, I like the feeling of having an indefinite or false root, and in a group situation someone else would probably be hitting it anyway...at Berklee, one of the great tidbits I took away was that the root and fifth are the least important notes). I've been practicing playing through standards, substituting triads for the full 7th chords. It works like this: a major triad built a minor third above the root yields the 3, 5 and 7 of a minor seventh chord, so an F major triad built on a D root gives you D, F, A, and C. If you play an F# minor triad over the same D root, it'll give you D, F#, A and C#, or a major seventh chord. It's not hard to figure out the other traids. Again, I usually leave out the root and just play the triad. I also like using triads to fill in just the extensions of a chord - for example, using the triad built a second above the root, in key, yields the extensions of the ninth, 11th and 13th, i.e., in C, Dm7 over a C root.

I've also started using a-m-i (that is, ring finger, middle, index) of my right hand to play single-note lines. I'd been focusing on only using i-m for a long time, after a flamenco teacher said that flamenco players used only rest strokes and i-m. But after reading a Sharon Isbin article about improving one's tremolo by doing exercises with a-m-i on a single string, I clued into the fact that actually, having a third finger to use would make it 33% easier. Duh. For sure, after a few days of practicing I was able to get a better tremolo that didn't feel stressful, as it usually did with only two fingers. I've been working on using it for playing scales or short melodies across strings, and it seems promising, though the hard part is making sure the sequence is always a-m-i. I'm also practicing using free strokes, rest strokes are great for volume, but it makes most sense to have every option available.