Latest / The Steve Stine Podcast / Mastering the Art of Playing Guitar Standing Up: A Guide to Performance-Ready Posture and Style

Transcript

Mastering the Art of Playing Guitar Standing Up: A Guide to Performance-Ready Posture and Style · The Steve Stine Podcast

• 0:35
  Steve: Hey, steve, here again.
• 0:36
  Steve: Thank you so much for joining me.
• 0:37
  Steve: What we're going to be talking about today is a simple concept, but something that a lot of people don't realize, especially when I'm teaching is to learn how to play standing up.
• 0:48
  Steve: Now, you might not think about it, but you know, if you practice all the time sitting down, you get to use to the guitar, being in a certain position on your body and the way you see things.
• 0:57
  Steve: You know the way your arms are situated, all that sort of thing.
• 1:00
  Steve: And then if you're given the opportunity, for instance, to perform with some other people, maybe it's just jamming, you know, maybe it's just in a garage jamming somewhere, or whatever it might be.
• 1:11
  Steve: But if you don't really give it much thought, the truth is is playing standing up is significantly different than sitting down, and the reason why I started talking or thinking about this is I was having a conversation with someone who is coming to one of our Nashville events that we do at Guitar Zoom, where we get a bunch of people together and we perform, because there's a lot of people out there that don't really get the opportunity to play on a stage with other musicians, you know, in front of other people and you know we try and facilitate that in a very non-stressful, encouraging environment.
• 1:48
  Steve: So it's fun, like your first experience doesn't have to be oh my god, it was terrible.
• 1:53
  Steve: But you know, one of the things that you have to do in any capacity performing is be prepared.
• 2:00
  Steve: So you work on your material.
• 2:01
  Steve: Whatever songs you're going to play, whatever parts you're playing, you know you try and learn all that kind of stuff.
• 2:05
  Steve: But one of the last things we don't we really sort of omit is thinking about playing standing up and you don't just want to rely on sitting down.
• 2:17
  Steve: Now there are people that physically need to sit down when they play, you know, for whatever reason, and that's perfectly fine, but I'm talking about everybody else that does have the ability to stand up.
• 2:26
  Steve: It's just uncomfortable.
• 2:27
  Steve: So one thing that I would highly recommend is you start thinking about practicing.
• 2:32
  Steve: You know, if you practice on a daily basis, spend some of that time practicing standing up, so you get used to where to position the guitar strap, for instance.
• 2:43
  Steve: You know you'll go through the battle of the lower it goes, the cooler it looks, but the harder it is to play in.
• 2:49
  Steve: The higher it goes, the easier it is to play, but you look a little bit like you've been playing with the Beatles, right, you got to find that balance and for me, strangely enough, the older I get, the guitar tends to go a little higher than it did when I was younger.
• 3:04
  Steve: But it depends on what you're doing too.
• 3:05
  Steve: I mean, if you're just playing chords and things like that, you know you could, you could have the guitar down a little bit further and it would still feel fairly comfortable.
• 3:12
  Steve: If you do a lot of soloing, and depending on what kind of soloing you do, you might need to have the guitar up a little bit.
• 3:19
  Steve: You know, I do a lot of faster kind of playing and all that kind of stuff, and because my arms are not long and my hands are not big, because I'm a relatively small human being, I need to make sure that the guitar is up high enough to where it's comfortable and I can execute the things that I need to execute without sacrificing that just so I look cool.
• 3:40
  Steve: Now that brings us to the next thing, which is the guitar strap itself.
• 3:44
  Steve: So there are many different kinds of straps out there.
• 3:47
  Steve: You can have straps that are leather, you can have straps that are padded.
• 3:52
  Steve: There's all kinds of different things like that, and what you want to do is find something that's comfortable with the guitar that you're playing.
• 4:00
  Steve: For instance, if I used a really wide leather strap with my guitar, what I used to find a lot with any kind of guitar strap that was kind of stiff is that over the course of playing in a night you might play from 9 to 1, that's what we used to do or 9.30 to 2, or whatever it might be Over the course of time over the night it would rub against my neck and I'd wind up with these big marks on my neck from the guitar strap moving so much.
• 4:26
  Steve: And so I like to have the guitar strap over a little bit, which means I like the guitar strap to be a little bit smaller in size.
• 4:34
  Steve: I like my guitar strap to be fairly padded.
• 4:37
  Steve: I don't like leather guitar straps, although somebody might.
• 4:42
  Steve: And then you take into account the weight of the guitar that you're playing.
• 4:45
  Steve: Okay, so if you're playing, for instance, a Les Paul that's really really, really heavy, you want that guitar strap to feel comfortable with that particular guitar.
• 4:55
  Steve: And over time again, we're talking about getting up and playing a song or two.
• 4:59
  Steve: Right, but if you were playing all night, you'd start realizing that even playing something like a Les Paul could deter the use of that particular guitar, simply because it's so heavy to play for a long period of time.
• 5:12
  Steve: Now, not everybody plays from nine to one.
• 5:14
  Steve: Some people play a song or two.
• 5:15
  Steve: Some people play in a band where they play for 30 minutes as an opening band for other bands or whatever it might be.
• 5:20
  Steve: Again, it doesn't matter, it's finding what's comfortable for you.
• 5:24
  Steve: All I'm saying is step number one is you got to learn to stand up and play.
• 5:28
  Steve: Step number two is you got to figure out where that guitar needs to be, and then you start thinking about the materials, like the guitar strap itself and the comfortability of that, and it's relative to the style or heaviness or weight of the guitar that you're playing.
• 5:44
  Steve: So I wanted to bring this up simply because oftentimes people don't think about this and then they get the opportunity to play for whatever reason, and they're going oh my God, that was just so weird because I've never played standing up and all of these things have never really been part of their thought process.
• 6:02
  Steve: Just like you want to dial in a song to where it's really comfortable if you're going to perform it with other people.
• 6:09
  Steve: You want to learn how to play standing up, walking around, standing in front of a microphone I don't know what it might be, but these are real things.
• 6:19
  Steve: It's not enough to just learn the song.
• 6:21
  Steve: Sometimes there's other elements learning how to stand on stage and be comfortable, or walk up to a microphone and sing and then move away from the microphone, whatever it might be, if you're comfortable with the pedals, or on the floor if you use pedals.
• 6:35
  Steve: It might seem silly, but these have to become part of your thought process, especially if you're playing a song.
• 6:43
  Steve: That requires a lot of thought process on your part.
• 6:46
  Steve: A lot of times I was trying to explain to people like it's always better to learn a song through the song, not just learn the song, but learn it so thorough that you're learning it beyond that point.
• 7:00
  Steve: So that way, if you need to look around, or you need to walk around, or you need to find a pedal, or you need to push this, or you drop a pick and you need to find a pick, it's not all throwing you off because you learn the song just enough to get through the song.
• 7:14
  Steve: If you push through and you learn the song beyond, then you've got this cushion here for anything else that might be happening.
• 7:22
  Steve: If you think about playing standing up, if you've never done it before and then all of a sudden you have to do it, that cushion goes away very quickly because you're going.
• 7:31
  Steve: Well, this feels really uncomfortable.
• 7:32
  Steve: So just something to think about a little bit.
• 7:34
  Steve: In your next practice session, depending on what your goals are, even if you don't see yourself necessarily playing with a band or something, you might get to the point where you'd like to do some jamming with people or whatever.
• 7:45
  Steve: And again, I'm not saying that you always have to play standing up, but there are instances where that's going to happen and if you've never done it before, you don't want to be the person that declines simply because you don't know how to play standing up.