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Agree with Buco that Django has something magic in that vibrato. How does he do it ... is it those massive strong fingers?! One thing I've found that gets you part of the way to the Django sound is not to do the vibrato immediately - first let the note ring for a short while, clean, and then add the vibrato. You can hear singers do this with their voice too! Picked up that tip at grappelli camp in Holland
1. Remember to rest stroke just before applying it if possible.
2. Though not always practical set up your idea so the note you are going to vibrato does not end on the high E string.
notice on the link below how few times the E string is used for vibrato.
3. In GJ pull your vibrato down except the high E string. There maybe other players who don't do it this way but this is how I get there.
Once again check below. As I mentioned earlier in the thread this is the same motion used by rock players.
www.scoredog.tv
Comments?
Is there an ideal speed for vibrato? I have seen a study of a number of sax players vibrato speed and that varied between around 4.5 cycles per second to 6.?.
www.scoredog.tv
BB King - Guitar Lesson - BB's Vibrato, Bending and Stretching with BB
If you think about it again: maybe the violin student more or less already had the required technique? But the teacher heard what was missing to a much greater extent. The emotional part. The part about telling a story. And when that part was added, the whole thing to fell into place. So the advice to read that poem was really spot on.
What if the teacher is Tchavolo and he tells you to play from your heart? What's your answer? "No thanks, that was not quite what I had in mind. How could that possibly make me a better musician?"
Keep an open mind! And never under estimate the power of good poetry!
I think I know what's gonna be my practice tonight: some self voyeurism in front of the mirror, while listening to some BB King, some Mastodon and some Antoine Boyer, and later read me some Yeats before I finally start looking for my own personal vibrato stamp.
Vibrato, maybe more than any other thing, makes a statement about each individual musician's mind-body connection, and it reveals this connection in a way that is quite apart from the mood being created in the music and the feeling that the musician is trying to express, the actual musical intention, or is just naturally expressing spontaneously. This is the aspect of vibrato that is impossible to copy, and maybe it should not be copied.
But obviously it can and should be worked on. Great soloists often say their vibrato comes right from the stomach, which sounds pretty esoteric and abstract - but it's like throwing a ball. There are literally hundreds of muscles involved in throwing a ball, and some people can pick up a ball and throw it half a kilometre without a lot of thought, while others have to really work on their throw to get any distance at all, and some never get it. But those who can throw a ball half a kilometre have a natural mind-body connection that gathers those hundreds of muscles around the bones into a muscular aggregation that supports the action perfectly and creates a performance that absolutely amazes the rest of us. But with direction, self-awareness and training, pretty much anyone with an arm can develop a beautiful throw. Or a great vibrato.
So a statement like, "my vibrato comes from deep within", starts to unpack itself if you really look at the muscles and bones involved and how everything ties together. After almost forty years of playing, my own vibrato begins with a stabilization of the shoulder, a grounding of the bones of the shoulder girdle and upper arm, that is rooted in the muscles of the mid-back and upper back, and muscles of the chest and abdomen. It really does feel, if I'm paying attention to all this, and I do still practice it, even after all this time, that it is coming right from the stomach. Then - irrespective if it's a slow, deep, classical style vibrato running along the string and rising above and falling below the note, or a sustaining vibrato with a curved shape to the motion that is rising from and returning to the pitch, or a more rapid, straight up-and-down motion that may be staying on one "side" of the string, or, for twice the speed, crossing from one side of the string to the other - in other words, in all cases, and regardless of style, the impulse runs through the stabilizing muscles, along the active muscles of the arm and forearm, through the bones of the hand into the string. And, in many cases, the whole arm is grounded and the muscles collected into a muscular aggregate of sufficient stability that the thumb comes right off the back of the neck. Not always, but it can - the sound is a bit different, and both possibilities have their place in a tune.
The idea of the muscular aggregate comes right out of classical guitar training, by the way, and it is a valuable, highly constructive and deepening concept in all kinds of ways - Django's chromatic scale run along a string with each note picked is just a great example of it, and it is an excellent way to practice that kind of coordinated movement; if the player is not grounded in his or her shoulder and the muscles are not working smoothly together, he or she just will not be able to do it - the picking won't match the movement from one fret to the other, the notes won't speak, it will lack rhythmic definition - it'll just be a mess. But just a little awareness applied to the arm can turn the clumsiest mess into a tight, fast, very clear and smooth run up and down the string in just an instant, almost immediately.
Same thing with vibrato. Hard to know exactly what to say without being there ... but I've helped quite a few open-minded young players with their vibrato by saying something like this: Ground the shoulder. Become aware of the connection of the body and the arm and the hand and the fingers, and from the fingers back to the body. Feel the string and the whole guitar as a further extension of those connections. Consider the possibility of it all being one connection. Hear the sound in the mind. Run that intent consciously right through the body all the way into the string. Listen to it ... connect that actual sound to the sound in the mind. Do you like it? Does the sound feel good? Put it out there - it's not art until it's in a public space - does anyone else like it?
I really try to stay out of these threads, but ... I guess I just had something to say this time that wouldn't be quiet. Hope there is some benefit in all that.
That's precisely how you play from your heart in a very deliberate technical manner.
Hope you'll try to stay out of these threads much less.