Just to clarify, I didn't mean to say I had trouble fully playing
adjacent double courses. I was talking about trouble when playing
pipipi on the same course.
If anything (for me, at least), to get an even balance of bordon and
treble on a course for p and for i, I would want the surface height to
be equal for both courses. In that way, I can plan to brush my fingers
and thumb across an equally horizontal surface. With the surface of a
bordon higher than the treble, I would have to roll my hand back to try
and coax an upward stroke out of the thumb, and a downward stroke of
the fingers (relatively speaking). That would be too much for my
feeble brain, I'm afraid. It's easier for me to conceive of a plane
that has targets to strike, and then adjust how I strike it (more
horizontally when playing double courses). But conceptually, the
adjustment for a given effect is the same for all fingers (and
thumb).
When running pipi on the same course, it's pure laziness and bad
technique that keeps me from playing the full course. And I pointed
out a problem with bordones for that technique, where the finger stroke
is accented more than the thumb. Raising the bordon (lowering the
treble) would only aggravate that for me. But again, my technique may
not be appropriate... I really don't know. I'm just doing what
produces a convincing sound *to me*, and hoping it's ate least
acceptable to the rest of the world.
__________________________________________________________________
From: Lex Eisenhardt <eisenha...@planet.nl>
To: vl <vihuela@cs.dartmouth.edu>; Martyn Hodgson
<hodgsonmar...@yahoo.co.uk>
Sent: Sunday, December 4, 2011 4:34 AM
Subject: [VIHUELA] Re: hand plucking position (wasGuitar bridges)
Hi Martyn,
> I agree with Chris: thumb-out does not inhibite playing through
both
> strings of a double course.
It makes it more difficult to go deeper into the low octave string than
the high octave. What I said is that if thumb and fingers are close (at
adjacent courses) there is the difficulty of both going deep into the
course. If the thumb should go deep, to play a good bass, the fingers
can easily miss the second string of the course. That is something
Chris also seemed to conclude. In this respect thumb-in is is
different.
> Neither need (or should) the thumb and finger ends meet using
> thumb-out as you suppose: the thumb is slightly forward of the
fingers.
> Probably the best historic representation of this from around the
time
> (second half 17thC) is Charles Mouton's hand position (on a lute) in
> the well known painting and engraving.
You mean the de Troy painting? What would Mouton have done when the
thumb and fingers had to play adjacent courses?
Lex
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