Advices to work

These recommendations stem from my own personal experience, so it's a bit dumb to say, but they mostly apply to me. Maybe you already have found your own different but efficient way to proceed to the workouts and in this case, it's all the better. yet, I feel that these advices may still be quite representative and universal since they work for most of the good musicians I have met. In short, I haven't taken that out from my magic hat...

As far as working out is concerned, Manouche music is not so different from the other styles.

In my opinion, it is mandatory to stick to these rules of thumb to make steady progresses.

It holds boil down to the following keywords:

Patience

Patience is the main necessary virtue to learn the style, and even more if you have already been playing guitar for a long time in another style. You have to accept that you're starting over from scratch and dammit if you cannot play those same shining solos as you do with an electric or folk guitar. It's as frustrating as can be but you have to bear in mind that you're almost an absolute beginner at the right hand technique and you should be aware that it will take some time (but not as much as sometimes advertised). Switching over from the right hand stuck on the sounding board to the floating right hand is definitely a humbling experience (as far as I can tell). Anyway, with a regular work and a good method, after a few months you should already start to feel that the position is becoming natural, to the point that you might envisage to use it exclusively for the other styles as well. Ok, that may be just me...

Regularity

Work must be regular to be efficient. It's better to work out every day half an hour than twelve hours in a row one day per month. It's the repetition of the gestures that makes the body/brain assimilate them. From my experience, working out one hour a day every day allows to achieve a few satisfactory results. This is what I did last year from July to October, every day between one or two hours, and sometimes four hours on week-ends. Of course, you must have enough spare time to be able to do it, a daily job and a family life comes with constraints that might seem disheartening at first glance. But I repeat, one hour a day every day and you should make nice progress. And it's possible to find one hour a day: quit watching TV or work out at lunch time in the car (which is exactly what I did)! With the help of a metronome, you will quickly realize that progress is being made from one week to another, and this is very encouraging.

Work method

As is the case for other music styles, a clear distinction must be drawn between strumming around for fun without any goal, and really working out on the instrument. It is utterly different. Working out is always with a view to making progress. Therefore, one should set goals not too tough for his level. Goals that are really hard to meet often come with much frustration and often are the sign of a lack of patience. In Manouche guitar, there are many things to work on: mostly the right hand technique of course (especially for the experienced guitarists in other styles) but also the left hand, the harmony, the typical chords, the embellishments, the arpeggios, the licks, and that list is not exhaustive...

Ideally, you should be able to auto-assess your own work in order to know whether or not you're making progress. The solution is right there: use a metronome. As far as I'm concerned, I bought one for the first time in my life last summer, to learn Manouche guitar and frankly, I have nothing bad to say about it. There are also freeware metronomes one the Internet such as this one, which has been highly recommended to me and indeed, it looks just fine. Actually, not only can one work on the sense of rhythm, but one can also evaluate his own progress thanks to that tool. It's very encouraging to see that a specific lick can be played cleanly 2-3 bpm faster than the previous week. It's even a very efficient way to find motivation.

Once the metronome is under reach, you must absolutely work at a tempo at which what you want to play is clean. The brain needs to understand a gesture to record it, muscles need to build fiber so as to be physically able to do the movement with the necessary aaccuracy. Once the gesture is recorded - it's said that it has to be repeated between 100 and 200 times on several days - you can speed up a tiny wee bit. Working out at too fast a tempo means that you will learn to play the same old mistakes faster. Speeding up is not the same as rushing. The hidden secret of people who can play fast and clean is just that: work at the right tempo. Rushing is another sign of impatience which breaks rule number one of this page! It's actually inefficient and in the end, it takes much more time to learn the same movement. My way of working is to start learning a new movement very slowly, and once it's there, I speed up the metronome 5 bpm at a time until I reach the limit where the notes can no longer be played cleanly. Once this limit is reached, I turn several bpm down and I work this specific exercise at this tempo. Doing so, you will be able to see achievements from one week to another, sometimes even from one day to another (honest). I still work out this way. When I speed up the metronome, there's often an very specific part of the exercise that stops being fluent so you should then focus the work on this very movement. To specifically work the right hand, I started with alternate picking on one string with the typical Manoucge floating wrist. Later, I did alternate picking on several strings 4 notes at a time. I needed several days just for this supposedly simple exercise, and still it was very slow. Then I practiced other movements and licks very slowly again (compared to how I would play the same licks with the wrist on the sounding board). Always a bit slower than my limit to learn the gesture. However, often in a work session, I play a specific lick faster than I can (100-110%), just to build up "stamina", nerves and muscles. One day later, I can already feel the benefits of it.

One should mostly focus on scales, arpeggios, alternate picking, consecutive downstrokes while changing strings. Basic movements. The final goal is to be able to play everything with the right hand as relaxed as possible.

To work improvisation, one must realise that it's very important to have something to say musically, therefore you should listen, listen and listen again, assimilate, integrate, in order to have something to sing. Scale and arpeggio techniques are to be considered merely as tools to serve the inner melody. You should not play scales just for the sake of it, the point is to keep being musical: listen to Django or anyone else as long as you listen.

Listening

Before everything, music is a matter of listening, and particularly in Manouche guitar where the tradition is mostly oral. To play in that style, you should at least know the basics and then to become permeated with it. It's exactly the same when you learn a new language, you need basic vocabulary to get yourself understood, and the best way to awquire this vocabulary is to live for a while in a country where that language is spoken. The Manouche music country can be found on CDs, in concerts, in jam sessions, while meeting with other musicians, with music lovers. All chances should be jumped on to listen to this music. The easiest way is to listen to the great masters of the styles, Django Reinhardt, Boulou Ferré, Angelo Debarre, Tchavolo Schmitt, Dorado Schmitt, Biréli Lagrène, Yorgui Loeffler, the list of musicians is very long and each one of them has his own personality... The way I do it is to listen to a CD for a certain period of time, like a week, in the car when going working the morning and when getting back in the evening, and to listen carefully to specific parts I find worth working on (solo parts, pompe, embellishments, etc...) and then why not, when the temptation is just too strong, I immediately play the guitar once at home to rightaway learn what has drawn my attention. Personally, I really do that often: I listen and when I hear something new, I try to learn it if I can. Just like a sponge.