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George Benson Picking Technique


Tone Taster

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Lotsa gear-gasms

 

A/B between a Fender Tonemaster for Clean and Mojave Scorpion for dirt

 

USing the MJM blues devil through the Tonemaster for the Fusion tone

 

I think I have finally found some amps I am at least 90-95% on - and that's good enough for me

 

Sold the '95 PRS and am getting a Howard Roberts Fusion for the jazz stuff

 

Upgrading my strat w/van zandt PUPS and a callaham trem block

 

WIll be building the yZe Axe as soon as I can get the funds up

 

Almost finished writing my second gtr instruction book of 3 in which all three will be self published at once the instant the 3rd one is completed

 

Lat-ron

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When I started playing, I grabbed th pick like that. Of course, I strated playing fingerstyle, but tried to play metal on my classical... well, it wasn't even my guitar, but a neighbor's.

 

Anyway, point is when I started playing in bands I noticed how my right-hand thumb always hurt after rehearsals. After high-school I pretty much stopped playing electric. Many years later I retaught myself and moved away from that.

 

Now, everytime I get a student that holds it like that, they have the same issue: the cartilage and cushioning material in that thumb joint starts to hurt. In this technique, more than others, relaxation is an extremely important factor.

"Without music, life would be a mistake."

--from 'Beyond Good and Evil', by Friedrich Nietzsche

 

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I know some people are more indestructable than others, but that hand position looks like it is inviting tendonitis. Is he really hitting the string with the pick at that extreme angle, its really hard to tell from the videos. I love Georges tone however he gets it though.
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I also held the pick like that when starting out. My first real jazz guitar teacher made me give it up for a more conventional way of holding the pick, because most of us in his jazz guitar class preferred bringing acoustic guitars to class instead of electric-and-amp (it was a college course - sometimes we got lazy about lugging amps across campus). He and the other students had trouble hearing me until he "fixed" my pick holding technique once and for all.

 

It's taken me several more years after that to gradually figure out that one's grip of the pick should not be constant - that it's actually ok to loosen the grip and move it a bit at times, and that it is actually easier to play faster with looser grip than with a tighter one.

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Mmmm...in the video clip, Benson doens't seem to have his hand & pick twisted up like that...he's holding it rather straight-on and perpendicular to the strings.

 

His hand look pretty relaxed and loose....which looks like a fairly normal picking style.

miroslav - miroslavmusic.com

 

"Just because it happened to you, it doesn't mean it's important."

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