>Also the LSA will be publishing an interview with Crawford in our >Quarterly, as soon as Ed Durbrow finishes it. Ed, did you discuss plectrum >technique in the interview?
We did a bit. I can tell you he was using a nylon G string from a guitar throughout the Medieval seminar in Vancouver 2004. I don't think Crawford would mind me giving away his trade secret as he was happy to share that information. :-) He has experimented with every conceivable plectrum material and has found ostrich quills stripped of the feathery part, and used on the THIN end, to be the best for him. That kind of quill ends up to be about the size and consistency of a G string which is easier to acquire and doesn't wear out as quickly. He has no problem to combine the middle finger (and ring finger too?) with the plectrum just as, say, Jimmy Page or another pick guitarist would when playing quasi-acoustic style on an electric. Personally, I found the string-pick to have a couple of great advantages. A flat pick has an angle to it. If you want a certain tone, you have to orient your hand at a precise angle to the string. With an ROUND quill or string, you have much more flexibility in your hand position yet can maintain a consistency of tone. The other advantage, of course, is that when you lose your pick you can probably find a bit of string somewhere. BTW, thanks to the help of Bruno et Valérie, Caroline Chamberlain, Guy Smith and Jason Yoshida, the interview has been completely transcribed and now is in the hands of James A Stimson who has the Herculean task of editing it for the Quarterly. cheers, -- Ed Durbrow Saitama, Japan http://www9.plala.or.jp/edurbrow/ To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
