Welcome to another installment of Intense Guitar! This month’s question comes from Darrell Toulouse from Beaver Creek, Colorado. Darrell asked, “You mentioned something about a hybrid technique used by a guitarist named Brett Garsed. Who is this guitarist and what is this technique that’s so different?”
Brett Garsed is a guitarist hailing from Australia whose technique combines both flatpicking and fingerpicking. His style is very legato, not unlike Allan Holdsworth or Bill Conners, but the big difference is that he employs fingerpicking while simultaneously using traditional flatpicking techniques. You can find out more about Brett by going to
BrettGarsed.com. I highly recommend checking out his unique style of playing. If you like his style, you may also want to check out
Michael Lee Firkins, who has a very similar style but adds a whammy bar technique that emulates the sound of a slide. Both guys are great guitarists with whom I’m sure you’ll be impressed.
I was fortunate enough to have had a few lessons with Brett and I’d like to share with you some of the concepts he taught me. I could never master the technique the way Brett has, but a few of the techniques have cropped up in my playing from time to time. Let’s look into incorporating them into your playing.
In exercises 1 and 2, the fingerings indicated under the staff are not for the fretting hand, but for the picking hand. The
bridge symbol indicates a downstroke, the remaining numbers – 2, 3, and 4 – indicate which fingers of the picking hand to use.
What we’re trying to do is get the technique so smooth that the listener won’t be able to tell when you are picking a note or plucking it with your fretting hand. From my experience, to get it this smooth is very difficult. Again, I highly recommend checking out Brett’s playing as an example.
Exercise 3 is basically a lick combing three and four notes on a string but utilizing our hybrid technique. It also incorporates slides to shift positions, so watch for the straight lines that indicate slides. Exercise 4 is a lick that combines slides as well as a hammer-on for the first two notes. I’ve indicated both fretting and picking hand indications between the notations. If you are left handed simply switch it around.
That does it for this month. If you have any questions you’d like me to address you can always reach me at
toshi@toshiiseda.com, intseguitr@aol.com or for those of you on MySpace:
myspace.com/toshiiseda. Good luck with this month’s topic and we’ll see you next month here in the best guitar magazine on the planet! As always, “Who dares wins!”
Toshi Iseda
Toshi Iseda is an Alumnus of the prestigeous Berklee College of Music and the American Conservatory of Music. He has been featured in Guitar Player, Guitar World and Guitar/Guitar One Magazines, and is a former instructor at the National Guitar Workshop and former instructor at the American Institute of Guitar.
toshi@toshiiseda.com
intseguitr@aol.com
www.TOSHIISEDA.com
myspace.com/toshiiseda