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Techniques: Part 4

© Jason Elek

Hello, everyone!

We’ve been talking for the last few weeks about some basic guitar tricks that everyone needs to know. This week we are going to look at some more advanced techniques. These tricks might take a little longer to learn and then perfect, but it’s worth it when you get a chance to throw them into your everyday playing.

The first trick is fairly simple in theory, but when it comes time to actually do it, it can be a little tougher. The technique is called “tremolo picking,” but it could just as easily be called “playing as fast as you can.” To perform tremolo picking, you just have to play one note, picking it as quickly as possible. This requires a clean right-hand technique with a whole lot of wrist speed. This is one where you just need to practice, especially to build up endurance, in order to perfect it. When you get decent at playing one note, try sliding the note up and down the string to create a melody.

Now we are going to look at a very interesting aspect of the guitar strings and what that means to our playing. We could get really technical in our discussion, but for the sake of keeping it simple, I’ll try to keep it simple.

When a string is plucked, it vibrates. Depending on the length, tension, and thickness of the string, it will vibrate at a certain frequency. But with a little tweaking, a vibrating string can be caused to change pitch without being fretted or plucked again.

Now that I have all the setup talk out of the way, we can get down to the physical application of this thing called “harmonics.” Harmonics are the sounds that are produced when a string is plucked then muted at just the right point on the string. Natural harmonics are the harmonics that occur on an open string. Harmonics can be found at nearly every fret; and they are played by plucking a string, then laying the fretting finger lightly on the string above the desired fret. In theory there is a corresponding harmonic for every point along a ringing string, but three of them are much stringer than the others. The twelfth-fret harmonic on an open string produces a tone an octave above the open note, and fifth-fret harmonic produces an octave fourth, and the seventh-fret harmonic produces a note two octaves above the root.

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