INTRO SESSION SHENANIGANS
The studio guitarist’s guide to happiness and personal fulfilment, as related by our resident session ace. This month: The Fickle Finger Of Fret.
You know the feeling. That fortnight in exotic San Tsunami On Sea is history and you’re back. Suitably sunburned, covered in a selection of insect bites, and nauseous due to that unwise selection from the restaurant specials on the last night. The liberal consumption of local firewater probably didn’t help either. Most of your luggage has been reclaimed, the train strike has necessitated a wallet melting taxi home and the memory of the six-hour flight delay still lingers stubbornly. The brochures for next year’s holiday lying on the doormat as you cross the threshold. All ATOL protected.
Good to know.
This year you made the decision to leave the guitar in its case. Not even that super sophisticated folding item, purchased specifically for these trips, has tempted you to bring an instrument with you. It’s become too fraught, too risky and too inconvenient. So now it’s payback time. The following morning you enter the studio/music room/ detention centre and grab a Gibson. It’s as you feared. Rather than a two-week break, it’s as if you had taken a two year sabbatical. Your fretting hand transmits genuine pain as the frets dig grooves into your callussoftened fingertips. It’s also clear that those digits are no longer on speaking terms and have zero interest in obeying neurological commands from Cerebral Cortex Head Office. Your picking hand has forgotten how to hold a plectrum, while attempts at fingerpicking merely result in a refusal more adamant than your 100-1 punt at Becher’s Brook. But fear not. In a dramatic break from the traditional contents of this column, here are two useful cut-out-and-keep wee exercises that may be of assistance in restoring your own personal axe-wielding confidence.
