SIGNAL CHAIN
DEAN FARLEY
Play Your Guitars, Train Your Brain
How’s everyone doing? We all know that inefficient… a waste of time.
everyone has personal favorite axes. These
are the old stalwarts that we end up going
to the most. You know which ones I’m
talking about. We go to them right away
because we are so familiar with their feel
and the sounds they produce. Recently, I
realized just how essential it was, if you’re a
musician who records or plays out regularly,
to know all of your instruments in the most
intimate sense. It’s even more important for
any guitarist who owns a fairly decent number of instruments, say six or more.
I found this out for myself over the course
of one weekend. I pulled out a guitar that
I hadn’t played in many a moon. Honestly,
I did not recognize it the way I once did. It
was annoying, because I needed to record a
track with it. I started to play it, and before
I knew it almost ten hours had passed, but
I noticed that I was back in sync with it
again. The next day, it felt like an old friend
as soon as I took it out of its case. Why not
develop an instrument rotation plan that
Right off the top of my head, I could compare a Gibson ES-335 and a Rickenbacker
360/6. Both are thin semi-hollowbody style
guitars featuring a pickup selector toggle
switch with two volume controls and two
tone controls.
You must first bond with each and every
instrument you acquire if it’s going to be
of any real use to you. Every time you
pick up a different guitar (new, vintage
or otherwise), your brain starts to make
subconscious notes about its neck width,
fret height, fingerboard radius and shape,
string spacing, scale length, and a host
of other aspects that your hands must
get familiar with in order to get used to
their new surroundings. Your brain actually “burns” new neural pathways that it
will use to control your hands and body
movements for each and every instrument
you own.
It’s essential to know all of
You may think that this isn’t an issue until
you’re out on the gig and you need to
adjust the guitar’s volume for a short section
of the song. If you’ve mostly been playing
the 335, your right hand is used to the volume controls being closest to the neck. If
you strap on the Rickenbacker 360/6 and
go for that same control, you’ll rudely find
yourself turning the wrong control—the
Rickenbacker’s volume/tone controls are
mounted upside-down and reversed from
the ES-335 you’re familiar with—surprise!
your instruments in the most
intimate sense, and even more
important for any guitarist
The fact is that new instruments are even
more complex in many ways, because
now your two hands must learn the instru-
ment from “square one.” A recent study
discovered that classical musicians who
always play the same instrument were
far more likely to suffer repetitive motion
injuries to their hands and wrists. A few
columns back we discussed the importance
of getting used to heavier string gauges
slowly, to avoid developing serious hand
and wrist injuries. Now there is evidence
that playing many types of instruments will
also help you avoid these common injuries.
who owns a fairly decent
number of instruments.
keeps you familiar will all of your instruments? Perhaps an hour a week might do
the trick, or less if you devoted some quality
playing time to each guitar early on.
Some other things happen if you don’t play
an instrument. The setup can change from
lack of playing. Guitars love to be played,
and a frequently played instrument is much
happier—no doubt about it. Playing a guitar
regularly will, in fact, keep your whole body
familiar with it.
As you can see, there are a lot of reasons
to switch often from one type of guitar to
another. You’ll learn and remember what
physical demands each guitar makes on
your technique. Finger techniques, such
as hammer-ons and pull-offs, are also built
into these neural pathways, so that also
means learning a new style or genre of
music will break new ground for the tones
you’ll produce from each particular guitar. This is a win-win situation, because if
you start getting really familiar with every
instrument in your collection, you’ll be able
to play anything on it at any time. Your
hands will be healthier because they will
automatically have a neural default position for each guitar. To top it all off, every
guitar you own will be more stable and
happy since it’s being played on a regular
basis (and this means less downtime in the
repair shop from non-play). It’s the right
thing to do. Happy picking and we’ll see
you next month.
Have you ever picked up a guitar that you
hardly ever play, and it feels completely
foreign? First, you have to establish a good
rapport with it; then you must maintain that
special connection as time goes on. If you
stop playing it for a lengthy period of time,
you have to go back and relearn. This is
Here’s another thing that you might not
have thought of—a guitar’s control layout.
Dean Farley
is the chief designer of "Snake Oil Brand Strings"
( sobstrings.net) and has had a profound influence
on the trends in the strings of today.
