Wrist tensing up

Lango-Django

oh, damn, sorry about screwing up your name, Jim... And sorry I freaked out back there! I'm relieved to learn you're not trying to play whole solos from memory... Licks, definitely! but not solos!

Once upon a time I used to try to play the five string banjo like my banjo hero, a guy named Bill Keith, a wonderful player!

but I found that to really duplicate his style, once I learned one of his tunes I had to constantly practise copying him exactly and given the complexity of his melodic style, there was zero room for error... as soon as I made the slightest mistake the whole solo would go right down the drain!

so I've been allergic to that kind of memorized recital playing ever since...

Lango-Django

Jim, another idea occurred to me last night... Why don't you choose a tune(s) you like at a tempo you like, and make this/these your feature, for which the other guitarist will play rhythm and you will play lead?

There are tons of out-of-the-mainstream slow/medium tunes to choose from which the rest of your band might enjoy playing as something different from the band's usual repertoire.

personally I find the tunes that are easiest for me to improvise over are the ones that pitch softballs over the plate at about 120 to 150 bpm and offer a variety of interesting chords to work over... tunes such as "Douce Ambiance" "Double Whiskey" "Out of Nowhere" or million other jazz standards eg Gershwin tunes like "Embraceable You" or "The Man I Love"

...as opposed to uptempo tunes with little harmonic interest like, say, "Sweet Georgia Brown" "Minor Swing" or "Lady Be Good" which only somebody with a LOT of chops can really make interesting!

Will

Jim Kaznosky

Thanks again Will.

The intention of my original post was to ask for what has worked to get some players to that next level, where they are loose all the time at any tempo. I have no illusions at going full bore +300 bpm at all times.

I took a workshop with Dario Napoli this weekend, and he offered some good general suggestions which I will try. His suggestions were very similar to what Jazzaferi mentioned in the second post. There are clearly no shortcuts.

Lango-Django

OK, buddy. as you might guess by my frequent postings, this is an issue I really identify with!

For myself, I've pretty much given up hoping or worrying about playing at fast tempi; if it happens, fine, but I think for me the only way it's ever going to happen is just as a result of playing so much at medium tempo that it just happens all by itself.

Right now I'm in Toronto for the TIFF film festival, and my final film on Saturday is a dramatization of Jimi Hendrix younger life called "All is by my side". I'm not really a big Hendrix fan, though I certainly respect his playing.

Anyway, at the Chapters bookstore near the Scotiabank cinema they had a big table display of books that had been made into movies showing at the TIFF, and one of them was a bio of Hendrix which presumably the movie is based on... So I was between films and picked it up for ten or twenty minutes.

Anyway, it turns out that as a teenager, Hendrix' nickname was "Marbles"--- why? Because his buddies all thought he'd lost his marbles, because he played his guitar ALL the time... one of his friends was quoted as saying that one night they went out to see a movie and he brought along his electric guitar and played it the whole time! Plus he played in the car on the way to gigs, on breaks in the middle of gigs, in the car on the way home from gigs... He just never stopped playing!

So that's probably the level of dedication required to play really great, and for me it's quite apparent that my marriage would never survive it, so therefore, I try to practise as much as I can, but hey, whatever level I eventually manage to achieve, my playing "is what it is"; whether that be slow, medium or fast!

Will