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transmothrai am a better musician because i'm slightly handicapped. listen:
because i have something wrong with my left third (ring) finger (probably gout), plus arthritis (i've had that since i was a child), i am often forced to play with two or three fingers at most. (Django Reinhardt played with two fingers due to a childhood fire which left two of his fingers stuck together.) now, here comes the cool part:
i generally only play, by myself, when i am feeling up to it. so that means that i learn songs, usually, using all my fingers. then, when i play live, or whenever someone asks, or for any other reason i find myself playing with a finger-full of tremendous pain (and i DO mean TREMENDOUS... pain on a truly epic scale; enough to make the heart literally palpitate-- i'd bet that even childbirth is nicer (not to take anything away from it; mad props to mothers), because mine is also traumatically painful AND occurs every god damn day), i have to force myself to find alternate fingerings on-the-fly, in realtime. so i end up choosing which notes i think are most important at the time, making for a more dynamic and spontaneous performance. and i've been doing this for so long (almost 15 years now), that it's insanely easy to do, with no problems whatsoever (outside of the debilitating, crippling pain itself).
not to mention that the alternate chord voicings are infinitely more interesting to hear as well. imagine if Django had grown up listening to rock and roll music instead... say, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, et al..
i, literally, as they say, rock, so to speak.
because i have something wrong with my left third (ring) finger (probably gout), plus arthritis (i've had that since i was a child), i am often forced to play with two or three fingers at most. (Django Reinhardt played with two fingers due to a childhood fire which left two of his fingers stuck together.) now, here comes the cool part:
i generally only play, by myself, when i am feeling up to it. so that means that i learn songs, usually, using all my fingers. then, when i play live, or whenever someone asks, or for any other reason i find myself playing with a finger-full of tremendous pain (and i DO mean TREMENDOUS... pain on a truly epic scale; enough to make the heart literally palpitate-- i'd bet that even childbirth is nicer (not to take anything away from it; mad props to mothers), because mine is also traumatically painful AND occurs every god damn day), i have to force myself to find alternate fingerings on-the-fly, in realtime. so i end up choosing which notes i think are most important at the time, making for a more dynamic and spontaneous performance. and i've been doing this for so long (almost 15 years now), that it's insanely easy to do, with no problems whatsoever (outside of the debilitating, crippling pain itself).
not to mention that the alternate chord voicings are infinitely more interesting to hear as well. imagine if Django had grown up listening to rock and roll music instead... say, Led Zeppelin and Van Halen and Jimi Hendrix and The Beatles and the Rolling Stones, et al..
i, literally, as they say, rock, so to speak.
