How To Make Your Guitar Playing Sound More Advanced With The Rake Technique
Before we get into the nuts and bolts about how to exactly play this rake technique, let’s look at what it is and how you can use this technique in your guitar playing.
When we perform a rake, we hit a group of strings with a sweeping motion of the pick. The pick grazes the strings in a downward motion from ceiling to floor. Although we’re hitting several strings, we only want one note to fully sound. The other strings will be muted, so they sound dead (leading to a percussive ‘click’) when the pick hits them.
The rake technique is a great technique to learn because it puts an emphasis on the note you apply the technique to. Once you get this technique under your fingers you can really grab the attention of the listener.
How To Perform The Rake Technique On Guitar
The key to performing this technique lies in the muting of the strings. Mute the strings with your right hand. If you were playing a note on the high e-string (for instance at the 8th fret), you would mute additional strings that are adjacent to that string. So in this case we could use the D-, G- and B-string as muted strings.
Mute the strings by resting your right hand on the strings, while you let your pick go over the strings that you muted, plus the string where the fretted note is located (which is in this case the high e-string).
Look at this example:
The first times that you try this you’ll probably mute too much, so that you don’t hear the first string being played. This is normal, as it takes some time to connect the placement of the right hand to the right strings.
You can also perform the technique with the pick going in the other direction (from floor to ceiling), you hear this a lot in the work of Stevie Ray Vaughan. Whenever you hear him playing a ‘flurry of notes’ he’s not only picking the notes that you hear being played, but he’s also raking the adjacent strings. Mastery of the rake technique will enable you to play in a fluent, almost ‘careless’ way.
The Rake Vs. Sweep Picking
The rake should not be confused with sweep picking. Sweep picking is a totally different technique. Some of the technical elements involved in performing both techniques are similar, but they are still different techniques. When you perform sweep picking, all the notes should produce a sound, while in case of the rake technique we’ll only hear sound on the last note of the rake.
How Guitar Techniques Can Boost Your Self-Expressiveness
In order to play highly emotional blues guitar solos, you should be able to add techniques such as the rake to your arsenal of techniques, because these will help you playing more expressive guitar solos.
Here are a few of the most expressive techniques on the guitar (in order of expressiveness):
-the rake
-vibrato
-bend vibrato
If we would combine all of these techniques and apply them on one single note we can create a highly expressive note, which sends shivers down your back and turns people’s heads. If you want to become a great blues guitar player you should be able to focus all of your attention on playing one highly expressive note. The rake technique is one technique that can help you achieve this.
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