Appendix · writing
Studio notes.
Occasional pieces, written between lessons, on questions that come up more often than they ought to and a few that don't come up often enough.
Note — February 2026
On pick wear, and what it will tell you if you let it.
Every few months I ask a student to empty their pick pocket onto the bench. Almost always there are four to six plectrums in various states of collapse, and almost always the wear patterns tell me more about what happened in the last ninety days of practice than any recording would.
A pick worn evenly across the point, with a matte finish on both faces, indicates a right hand that is doing approximately what it should. A pick worn heavily on one side, with a polished groove where the string has dug in, indicates an attack angle that has collapsed toward flat — usually because the wrist has stopped rotating and the forearm has begun to push. A pick worn at the shoulder rather than the tip indicates a grip that has crept forward, which in turn indicates tension elsewhere in the hand.
I keep a small paperboard box of retired student picks. It is, among other things, a teaching aid. When a new student insists that their right-hand technique is fine, I open the box and we look at picks together for about five minutes. It is more persuasive than anything I could say.
Note — November 2025
On the 1927 Paramount, and the difficulty of instruments that remember things.
The Paramount Style C that lives on the studio wall was made, as best I can date it, in the spring of 1927. It has been re-headed four times in the nineteen years I have owned it, re-fretted once, and had its tailpiece straightened after a previous owner dropped it in what must have been a fairly spectacular way. It sounds, on a good day, like nothing else in the room.
Students sometimes ask to play it, and I almost always say yes. What I notice when they do is not whether they sound good on it — most do not, at first — but whether they adjust. An instrument this old has preferences. It wants a lighter pick than the student brought; it wants the attack two inches further from the bridge than they are used to; it wants a slower tremolo. The students who listen to it learn something in ten minutes that I could not have taught them in a month. The students who do not listen to it hand it back and say it is a nice instrument, and we go on with the lesson, and I try not to hold it against them.
Note — August 2025
On teaching tremolo, which is not what most people think it is.
Tremolo is frequently taught as a speed problem. It is not. It is a consistency problem with a speed floor. Below roughly ten strokes per second the ear will hear the individual strokes and the illusion of sustain fails. Above that floor, the only thing that matters is evenness — of stroke spacing, of stroke volume, and of attack angle across the up- and down-stroke pair.
I have students begin tremolo at 60 bpm, sixteenth notes, on a single open string. That is four strokes per beat, four beats per second — well below the audibility floor. The goal is not to produce the effect of sustain. The goal is to produce sixteen consecutive strokes that are identical. When that is reliable, we move to 72 bpm, then 84, then 96, and somewhere between 96 and 108 the individual strokes disappear and tremolo, so-called, simply arrives.
This takes most students between four and nine months of daily attention. It is the single most valuable thing the right hand learns.
Note — May 2025
On the question of speed, which is asked more often than it should be.
A student asked recently how fast I can play 12th Street Rag. I told them the honest answer, which is that I do not know and do not particularly care, and we spent the rest of the lesson on the B strain at 72 bpm. They left slightly disappointed. They will, in a year or two, understand why.
Speed is a byproduct. It is what happens to a well-trained right hand when you stop asking it to go faster. The players in the 1920s catalogs who play at what sound like impossible tempos are not, for the most part, playing quickly in any effortful sense. They are playing cleanly, at a metronome mark they have earned, and the recording engineer has captured what the hand happens to produce when nothing is in its way.
If you want to play fast, play slowly, accurately, for a long time. This advice is older than the instrument.