Blues legend Eric Bibb on why you should learn classical guitar first: “It told me that the guitar really can be an orchestra”
Eric Bibb reckons every guitarist can benefit from a little classical training.
The GRAMMY nominated singer-songwriter and blues veteran recently reflected on his early guitar lessons, explaining how studying classical technique opened his eyes to the instrument’s full potential – and helped lay the foundations for the fingerstyle approach that would later become a hallmark of his playing.
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Speaking in the latest issue of Guitarist, Bibb was asked how his childhood classical guitar lessons influenced his acoustic technique.
To which he replies, “What it told me right from the start was that the guitar really can be an orchestra, and if you use your thumb and three fingers on your right hand, you can arpeggiate and you can create all kinds of different sounds and textures.”
Those lessons proved particularly useful when Bibb later discovered fingerpicking blues players such as Mississippi John Hurt.
“It really helped me when I started discovering fingerpicking – you know, John Hurt kind of stuff,” he explains. “I started out with Carcassi [Matteo Carcassi, 1792 to 1853, author of arpeggio studies still in use today], so all of that stuff sort of came together at a certain point.”
“When I really focused on my own style of playing, I knew I wanted to fingerpick, I knew I wanted to arpeggiate. So all of that has come into my technique,” Bibb continues. “I tried fingerpicks at one point, and thumbpicks, but they’d fly off. I’d get excited and sweaty, and they’d just fly off. But Ry Cooder once said there is really no better tool for the guitar than your right hand. There are so many ways you can approach the guitar with just your bare hands.”
That said, that doesn’t mean his picking hand is entirely maintenance-free. Bibb reveals he uses “acrylic nail enhancements” on three fingers of his right hand to avoid a fingerstyle player’s nightmare scenario.
“I found that, without it, I’m risking breaking a nail and then things get kind of complicated,” he says. “I discovered the hard way that if I chipped a nail in the middle of a show, it was really going to affect my playing in a negative way. And you can cover your nails with hard polish, but I find that the best thing for me is the acrylic. I’m not sure it’s really great for your health, but you sacrifice all for art.”
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Source: www.guitar-bass.net
