Working On 'Feel'

Is your playing a bit flat? Would you like to get more feel and groove into your lead playing?

Mark Wingfield looks at some ways this can be worked on.

This "feel" so often talked about, is largely based on a high degree of physical control. The difference between a given riff or musical phrase played "adequately" as opposed to with "loads of feel" is as I said mainly a matter of physical control, and comes down to technique and practice again.

There are several thing you can do to work directly on the level of control and technique that feel requires. Remember: as I've mentioned in previous articles, there is more than one area of technique. For example, there is as much technique involved in the subtle control of dynamics (loud vs quiet) as there is in playing fast runs - its just a different area of technique. Microtonal control of pitch in bends as well as a controlled and expressive vibrato, are other areas of technique that contribute to feel and like playing fast, require a lot of practice and attention to detail.

Note that playing fast, is not something that is normally thought of as being necessary for playing with feel. Fast playing doesn't necessarily get in the way of feel either, but there are many great players known for their "feel" who never play anything really fast.

So here are a couple of things I've found over the years that really help students who are working on feel.

We'll concentrate here on blues, rock, and related styles of playing. These will also help jazz players. However for jazz there are quite a number of other techniques to work on in this area, as many jazz players cover a wide variety of different "feels" in thier playing. But this is something I'll leave for another article.

I) Practice bending strings:

1) After you pick the note, but before you bend it, wait an instant. This helps smooth out the bend and establishes the origonal pitch in the ear of the listener - which can be very important.

2) When you bend, start the bend slow and speed up the movement the higher it gets until you reach your destination pitch.

3) Bend up a 4th from your origonal note and hold it, apply vibrato (using rotation of the wrist) to the sustained bend. You may find this hard to do at first, but it really builds physical control.

4) Bend up a minor 3rd, bring back down, repeat rhythmically as if it were a huge vibrato.

The last two on the list above, might seem like hard work. No one said it was going to be easy! They will however, if practised until they become relatively easy, increase your control and technique in ways vital to producing rock and blues feel (we're talking about post 1967 playing here: before we get any indignant early blues enthusiast letters to the contrary).

II) Getting feel into riffs:

1) Play a whole solo using only one riff, you can move the riff around, but it must be the same fingering - the same riff even if its transposed.

2) Do the above, changing the accenting in the riff and the timing between the notes in the riff. Eg: move the accent from the first note in the riff to the second, third etc... Eg: change the timing between the notes.

Listen to the following examples: all are the same riff, yet all have different feels due to the timing and accenting between the notes.

bend at start (67k wav)

bend in middle (65k wav)

long bend (97k wav)

bend at end (73k wav)

Its important to use a metronome as a reference point, a point of strength from which you have the control to push and pull on the timing. Without that reference, you may not have the freedom to stretch out or to create different feels.

If you are at a point in your playing where you can play a basic solo, you know some riffs and you know to fit them over the chords, these exercises will really help your physical control. You'll have to work hard on them, but when you have the physical control, as long as you feel the music, that feel will come out in your playing.

Mark Wingfield