Partial chord - fingering tecnhique?

[alltunes]

Curious as to what most folks do around here. Let's say you are playing with a bass player (and or piano) and want to stay away from 6th and 5th string. Do you finger the entire chord but isolate your pick/fingers to the upper strings or do you modify the chord and not even fret the 5th and 6th strings?

[wolflen]

knowing inversions and chord patterns are very useful tools on the high strings four, three and even two voice chord fragments can be used in some very tasty ways

for me learning harmonized scales and harmonic devices on the higher string sets is very useful in comping in general and adding "sugar" working in small combo settings

[ModesSchmodes]

Right now the default mode for me when approaching chord changes I haven't studied yet is playing Drop 2s on the top 4 strings. No need to ever touch the 5th and 6th string.

Get the Randy Vincent Drop 2 Voicings books, it's amazing!

[rpjazzguitar]

There are different approaches, depending on the situation.

I learned four note chords on the top 4 strings years ago and I often use them.

I am likely to avoid the low E entirely, but I don't worry quite so much about the A string. Bear in mind, I play with the bass rolled down on the amp and my pickup slanted down at the low strings. I'm trying to avoid a muddy sound.

For some comping it's 3rds and 7ths on the D and G strings. Sometimes, if that sounds too bassy or muddy for the band, I'll go to the G and B strings.

I generally don't fret strings that I'm not going to play. I did years ago, but, over time, you stop seeing a grip and start seeing the individual notes.

And, then, there's comping where I don't think about chord grips and I just pick the notes I want, interspersing the two and/or three note chords with some single note lines.

Slightly off topic: And, then there's an issue regarding which grips you think about in relation to a specific chord. Suppose, for example, the chart says Fmaj7. You've got grips for it. But, you can also probably use the grips you know for Am7 (A C E G) which will sound like Fmaj9. If you think D7sus (D G A C) you get the sound of F6/9. If you think Cmaj7 (C E G B) you get Fmaj7#11. If you think Dm7 (D F A C) you get F6. And so on. You can learn them as "grip substitutions" or as individual voices extending the basic harmony. Or maybe some other way.

[Christian Miller]

I watched a couple of videos on gypsy picking.

One made the point that the downstroke is from the elbow, but the upstroke is not. Apparently, the upstroke is more wrist or maybe arm rotation.

I'm having trouble understanding how that works at high speed. If you've swung your elbow down to play a downstroke, when do you move it back to where you started so that it's ready for the next downstroke?

Maybe the videos I watched weren't clear enough.

Anybody have a video to suggest?

The human body does not like rapid alternation of the same muscle group, it will tend to go into uncontrollable spasm. By using different muscle groups for the up and down stroke, Gypsy picking stays relaxed at high speeds.

Go down with the whole arm weight into the guitar and the next string, but the arm doesn’t move that much - the string stops you. Flip the pick up and out using the wrist rotation and you may also use your arm a little to recover but it’s not something I ever practiced consciously. I would advise exaggerating the motions though;get the quality of them right. As you speed up they’ll get smaller but the feeling will remain.

The sweeping raking motion for arpeggios is a bit different. Obviously you’ll need to recover the picking arm more after that, a bit like rhythm playing.

[pauln]

You are asking a very good philosophical guitar* question...

Should you form more chord than you want to sound, or should you only form the part you want to sound?

My thinking may be coming from an unfamiliar place, so I'll start with this... Imagine you were a gifted sight singer sight reading and singing a melody line, but began noticing that the accompanying written bass line below included harmonically weird or random notes. It is so "off" that you conclude someone messed up and scored the bass line there from another song by mistake. Since you can't help but read it as you sing, the thing is now, can you ignore it or does it continue to bug you, even mess up your harmonic sense of the melody line?

For guitarists, let's say you arrive at the G11 sound in a song, but you have a bass player, so you just want to sound the upper part.
You could do this:
3x321x you form this because you know it well, but you just sound this upper part xx321x
So with a bass player under you, the song presents the G11 sound

Later the song arrives at an F major.
You could do this:
3x321x and just sound xx321x like before...
- but do you want to be calling the fingered chord G11 but call the strings sounded an F major triad?
- but do you want to ever think of the F major triad and the G11 as harmonically the same?
- but do you really want to separate the harmonic meaning of what you form from what you sound?
The answer to those might be maybe, if your domain of intention is based strictly on what you sound, not what you finger. For guitarists whose intentionally is strictly of sounded strings, I guess they use a more formal system to map their harmonic contexts to the sounding fingered strings only.
Or you could form xx321x...
- but then why didn't you do that when you wanted the upper G11 sound over the bass?
- but then during the G11 aren't you in some sense sounding an F major triad over the bass's G?
- but then during the G11 are you supposed to hear (harmonically organize) that as F or F/G or G11?

Playing rootless upper structures already produces things that may take many different harmonic names in different contexts, but at least hearing the appropriate context of the moment keeps things clear. My message to the left hand is a sound; to play the sound I'm hearing in my mind's ear. My "hand's musical ear" views the string and fret intersections on the finger board as the set of intentional sounds, and my hand views intentional fingering as intentional sound. What would be very messy for me is intentionally fingering things that are not meant to be part of the intentionally sounded current context. I would be kind of like the sight singer that can't completely ignore the incorrect bass line - where the thing I'm not singing/sounding (the bass line) is still there in the staff (like unsounded but fingered notes). My hand still "hears" the fingerings not being sounded. That's OK for something like G11 fingered as 3x321x but sounded as xx321x, but so many other upper structures with multiple harmonic contexts would contain "wrong notes" under them in their various full fingered chords... I just finger what I hear, what I want to hear.

* What do any pianists here say?
Do you ever finger keys but not press them to sound?
If so, are they only "harmonically correct" unsounded keys or it doesn't matter?

[alltunes]

You are asking a very good philosophical guitar* question...

Should you form more chord than you want to sound, or should you only form the part you want to sound?

Yes this was the intent of my question. More of a curiosity then anything.

Yes I know about drop 2 voicings; even had Randy's book....trying to stick to playing songs these days and then try and fill in with theory later if that makes sense.

Thanks for replies.

[pauln]

"The unexamined technique is not worth playing."
Socrates

[timmer]

* What do any pianists here say?
Do you ever finger keys but not press them to sound?
If so, are they only "harmonically correct" unsounded keys or it doesn't matter?

No to ghost notes I think. But as far as actual voicing, it depends on if the context is two-handed voicings, or left-hand voicings to support right-hand soloing. For the latter, it's awkward (indeed impossible in my case) to play full tenths (drop-2) with one hand. Even if reachable, pretty tough to get smooth voice leading going. Much more common is to use, guess what, shell voicings. 3rds and 7ths, plus desired color tones. These can get pretty clustered sounding if you try to get a lot of notes in there, because of that range limit that a single hand has.

For two-hand playing (comping for someone else, etc.), it is also very common and convenient to use those shell voicings in the left hand, and add in other tones to taste with the right. But I'm sure I'm not the only one who might also fall back on root/3rd/7th, or just root/7th, in the left hand as well. Hard habit to break as that's what I would do a lot of when practicing solo.

[Christian Miller]

"The unexamined technique is not worth playing."
Socrates

Someone's been at the AI image generator :-)

It's really interesting how bad these things are at guitars, that's one of the better ones I've seen.

[pauln]

Someone's been at the AI image generator :-)

It's really interesting how bad these things are at guitars, that's one of the better ones I've seen.

Yeah, using DALL·E mini DALL*E mini by craiyon.com on Hugging Face

It returns nine images. I guess the web page is designed to use mouse down event detection to let the AI know which picture is clicked first - for learning. I put in your name and this forum's url... clicked first on this one Looks like an album cover.

[whiskey02]

First thing to do is ask the bass player what they're cool with; does this get in your way, steal your thunder, sound good to you? There's a decent chance you'll be allowed more freedom than you might think.

[Christian Miller]

Yeah, using DALL·E mini DALL*E mini by craiyon.com on Hugging Face

It returns nine images. I guess the web page is designed to use mouse down event detection to let the AI know which picture is clicked first - for learning. I put in your name and this forum's url... clicked first on this one Looks like an album cover.

I don’t recommend putting that on the cover of a CD if you wish to sell any

[Christian Miller]

this is what an AI painted when I input ‘melodic minor harmony’ though. Beats melty Bach with an uncanny-caster

[pauln]

Melty Bach appears to have six left hand fingers