How to become a machine-gunning steel-string guitarist? (i.e. Tremolo Help Wanted!)

Cafe Society
1

I’ve been trying to figure how to do tremolo on my steel-string and I keep coming up short. I know the key is practice, but I don’t even know how I’m supposed to be practicing!

It seems (from the Net) that tremolo is most common using finger-picking style on a nylon-string guitar. I have to make do with a steel-string; is it better to learn finger-picking or with a pick?

With finger-picking, it seems there are a million ways to do it (p = thumb, i = index, m = middle, a = ring):

  1. i m a i m a i m a
  2. a m i a m i a m i
  3. p i m a p i m a
  4. p a m i p a m i
  5. p i a m i p i a m i

I’m sure there’re more, but you get the picture. I’m sure they’re all valid, but any recommendations about what would be better to begin with? Any other tips?

Using a pick, should it be a really hard one, soft one, or somewhere in between? Should the motion be like picking normally, except really fast? Or something different?

For reference, I’ve been trying to learn the tremolo parts from La Bamba (Los Lobos), and Mediterranean Sundance - Rio Ancho (Guitar Trio). Is it just a matter of practicing the technique 1000 times slowly? Any advice would be much appreciated.

2

For flat picking, use a heavy pick and just barely let the point touch the string. If you really dig into the string with the pick, like I do, you’ll never get that fast, even tremolo thing going.

3

I assume by tremolo you mean just rapid up-and-down picking of a single string?

With a flatpick, the first question to ask is: is your wrist straight or angled? If you strum with your wrist straight - basically a shaking-hands motion; it is the approach most new players automatically assume, with fingers splayed out - then you can be dextrous but can’t get machine-gun velocity in a single string except for accents.

However, if you curl your fingers under and angle your wrist in, you engage the full mechanics of your elbow, foream and wrist and a rapid up-and-down comes much more easily. But at a cost: it is very hard to control. You initially feel like you are swatting a fly with a sledgehammer. It takes interminable practice and repetition to focus the motion. Once you do though, you’re off to the races.

Heavier-gauge strings help. A heavier-guage pick held as **NCUN **describes helps.

Watch fast jazz guitarists - and Eddie Van Halen holds his pick this way pretty conspicuously, although between his thumb and middle finger from habit…

4

Not sure why, but am I the only person whose mind flashed on this movie upon reading the thread title?