John Kavanagh
From:
Kentville, Nova Scotia, Canada * R.I.P.
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Posted 26 Jul 2002 6:26 pm |
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A friend of mine plays lap guitar in a way I've never seen before. It's weird, but it works for him and I wondered if anyone else uses this trick.
He started playing mostly bottleneck style, and had a machinist make up a heavy brass slide for him. When he wanted to play lap style, he used the same slide and stuck it on the end of his thumb. His thumb is only in to about the first joint, and he holds the rest of his fingers more or less normally, muting behind the "bar" and doing the occasional string pull. What I really envy about his method is the ease of doing slants - he just flexes the joint of his thumb in or out to get a quick, controlled diagonal in either direction.
(Myself, I'm alternating between a Shubb-Pearse, which makes string pulls easier but makes for a rather tense left hand, and a bullet bar that just rests on the strings, nice and relaxed, but I have to shift grips a little to do pulls or backwards slants.)
I'm not considering switching to what he calls "the doofus thumb method", nor am I really recommending it to innocent beginners ("This guitarist is a trained professional - do not try this at home"), but it has its points, and it works so well for him that I'm trying to convince him not to relearn
the "proper" way but to go with his own style and see where it takes him - I think it's a workable technique. I guess I think it's like a lefty playing a righty-strung guitar upside down - the standard way is standard for good reasons, but once you've got a certain number of brain cells invested in an alternate method, it's part of you and you might as well ride with it instead of starting over.
Anybody else play this way, or seen anyone do it?
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John Kavanagh
D-8, acoustic 8
mostly G6 and C13
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Doug Smith
From:
Medway, Ohio
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Posted 27 Jul 2002 7:35 am
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Your post reminds me of my teacher when I first learned steel. He used a wrist pin out of a truck engine for a bar, and picked with just two fingers. He was a wonderful player, but he urged me to used more conventional techniques, and held Jerry Byrd up as a model, and told me repeatedly, "Don't play like I do-it will limit you."
While I think the doofus method is interesting, I think it would be limiting. I wonder what kind of tone you could coax out of a bar that's stuck on the end of your thumb. |
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