Techniques

When Angelo Debarre played in Sheffield at the end of last year I was lucky enough to have a lesson on rhythm guitar from Dave Kelby. It was a very useful lesson which gave me lots of useful practice tips, if you are a rhythm guitarist then a single lesson from Dave could save you hours and hours of practice time, I wish I had had one ten years ago.

I won’t tell you all his ideas because they are his IP and you should get lessons from him but one theme was the need to practice upstrokes for rhythm guitar. A downstroke is fairly self-evident and relatively natural - it goes with gravity after all. An upstroke is not so natural yet we rarely devote any specific practice to upstrokes. Dave says, and I am sure it is true, that if your upstroke is inefficient or incorrectly aligned it will sap a lot of your strength during a gig and reduce the top speed at which you can play (the lead instruments would always like to go faster in our band). He showed me a warm-up technique that Fapy Lafertin had shown him which again you could learn from a lesson from him. I have found some other good exercises from an instructional DVD for banjo by Buddy Wachter (banjo playing? don’t ask!). In this exercise he damps the strings of the banjo over the fretboard so you concentrate only on the strumming hand. He then sets a metronome going and plays equal weight even time up and down strums across the strings. He starts off with straight quavers, then goes up a gear to quaver triplets, semi-quavers and finally semi-quaver triplets. I have been doing this a bit to develop tremolo on the banjo, it gets quite addictive and it feels like playing a drum so it becomes a pitchless percussive exercise - which is a huge element of rhythm guitar anyway. It doesn’t sound that interesting but getting perfectly synced with the metronome does produce a trance-like satisfaction. The great payoff comes when you go back to playing Django rhythm guitar it suddenly seems a lot easier and your top speed will have increased substantially.