I wrote this in response to a post in an Eddie Van Halen group, which most of my friends are not part of, but yeah - I have been geeking out on this stuff for 30 years. Ernest Chapman Jay Kimzey Aaron Thomas By definition tremelo can be a wavering effect in a musical tone, typically produced by rapid reiteration of a note. Most players will achieve adequate (and in some cases freakish) speed by tightly gripipng the pick and moving their entire forearm up and down, hinging at the elbow. Depending on your physique/endurance, you can get really great speed. To some extent, EVH used this first method (see appearance on David Letterman, circa 1984, early in the show) while warming up. However, the cool and somewhat unique method by which EVH achieved tremelo picking was to suspend his wrist above the guitar and rotate his hand at the wrist as if he were opening a doorknob, or bowing a violin. Note that his upper part of his forearm nearest the elbow would be resting on the body of the guitar, which moved the anchor point away from the wrist area enough for there to be room to pick in this fashion. Due to EVHs favored yet somewhat unorthodox pick grip (between thumb and middle finger rather than thumb and index), when doing his rotary tremelo picking, his remaining fingers on the picking hand would splay out slightly, much like a blur of wings. This led to some alternative names to EVHs technique: butterfly picking, or hummingbird picking. For purpose of discussion, Ill refer to EVHs approach as hummingbird picking. Traditional tremelo picking is usually easier to master, because the anchor point and hinge are the same. Hummingbird picking is a little trickier to master for many guitarists, unless they have played a bowed instrument, open a lot of doorknobs or other similar repetitious manuevers, or are just plain stubborn. Practice makes perfect, however, so a student can attack hummingbird picking first by learning how to grip the pick between thumb and middle finger. Play like that for several months. If the hand starts to hurt, stop and revert to your normal picking technique, then go back when comfortable to build endurance. If you could care less about the pick grip, or have EVHs pick grip down pat, then anchor your upper forearm on your guitar, suspend your picking hand and pick above the strings and rotate your wrist back and forth clockwise, then counter-clockwise. If you are not used to this, it will seem foreign at first. Start slowly - and then slowly build up speed. Give yourself a month or so of semi-regular practice. Sit down when you practice - be comfortable. If you drive a car, you can hold a pick next to the steering wheel and hummingbird pick the steering wheel to some extent - it helps with becoming familiar with the rotary motion. I am by no means an EVH expert, nor anywhere close to being a virtuoso, but I do think that hummingbird picking is cool looking, and fun, and it sounds different than regular tremelo picking, because there is much more transient pick clatter going on, due to the wide sweep of the pick. Heres a short vid below that I did that shows hummingbird picking on an unamplified guitar, doing it with about every pick grip imaginable, including no pick (if you have a good thumbnail, you dont need a pick to do the hummingbird picking technique). Also, there are a couple of other examples of hummingbird picking by other players, who have larger hands - and their technique looks way cooler than mine. :-) just search for hummingbird picking on YT. Lastly, use it while you got it. The older we get, the more stiff we get. If you listen to early bootlegs of EVH in the club days, you can tell in his live solos when he is using hummingbird picking - and it is incredibly fast. In some cases faster than the recorded version of Eruption off the first album. As you progress through other video versions - 1981(?) in Brazil, then Live Without a Net, then up to 2013, you can see that he is slowing down ever so slightly. To reiterate: Play Fast While You Can. :-) youtube/watch?v=4XTkRuQxDx4
Posted on: Wed, 29 Oct 2014 18:26:37 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015