Little Guitars - Van Halen

Yesterday was a good day. Had Rokafonik Philharmonik practice from 11-2, guitar lesson, discovered a great band from the UK called Elbow and bought one of their albums (THEIR NEW ALBUM COMES OUT IN MARCH!!!), played some more guitar, and went to Rocky Horror Picture Show! Always a blast.

In my guitar lesson, my teacher (A.J. Niilo) showed me a really sick song, Little Guitars by Van Halen. It's more so the intro to the song that got me pretty excited. Eddie has always had really great ideas and technique and could fuse other styles' feels to create something that would make the listener go "WHOA! What WAS that?!". I had one of those experiences while listening, but mostly watching my teacher play it. What Eddie is doing here is tremolo picking (plucking a string repeatedly very, very quickly) the high E string of the guitar, while tapping notes on the bottom E string with his left hand. So the two hands are doing something very different from each other, but it fuses together nicely. This is an old technique of playing rhythm and melody popular in Spanish flamenco music, but originating in the renaissance period. But the original players wouldn't have a pick. So in this way, Eddie made it his own.

Here is a great example of the older way of playing this technique. I wanted to find something other than the famous Malaguena melody that most people have heard. This is a fantastic and very famous flamenco player named Paco de Lucia.

This week, my challenge to myself is to be going to learn a classical piece. Probably from the renaissance period, since I adore that music and also, REN FEST IS NEAR!! YAY!