Your guitar is eating you!

No matter what I do, I don’t give this poor old body the attention it deserves. And that goes double for when I sit with the guitar in my hands, leaning and grimacing, straining and nobraining. Athletes get told how to work with their equipment so that the partnership between man and machine generates optimum physical performance, cheers from the crowd and untold sponsorship wealth.
I was watching a movie about Modigliani the other day, and it seemed to me that the actors portraying painters working at their easels gave the impression that painting a picture involves getting to know how to stand, how to hold the brush, and so on. And they have to approach their art this way because they make marks on the canvas, and those marks don’t fade away like bum notes on the guitar. If a painter puts the paint on too heavily
he has to gather his forces and make a whole new start next time he touches the canvas. It’s harder for a musician to stand back and see exactly what direction he needs to take to make this strange process he’s involved in “art”.
So the first thing we gotta take care of is to not hurt ourselves. One resource for people who want to learn to play a guitar without becoming a cripple is Guitar Principles. Sign up for their newsletter, and you’ll have some valuable food for guitar playing in your in-box every week.
Another interesting resource is http://buildingtheergonomicguitar.com/ which is concerned with guitars that FEEL good to play. Here’s a good article on RSI and the gallery of ergonomic guitar designs has a bunch of nicely designed guitars that “range from slight departures from the norm to completely different approaches.”
Here’s an example of ergonomic thinking from the inventor of the Bardophone “A traditional guitar is structurally made in a way that it is impossible to play it in a correct position without using all kinds of awkward stratagems that can have bad physical effects on the guitarist:
- Using a guitar stool (like classical guitarists) warps your spine and alters the blood circulation in the leg on the stool !
- Folding your legs obstructs the blood stream in the higher leg!
- Using a strap puts weight on your shoulders and your spine!
If you try not to use any of these tricks, your right shoulder(for a right handed person)will stand too high and your left hand will play the guitar’s neck in a position that is too low to achieve a respectable velocity ! The ones who still try ,end up with a bent back!
The idea, granted that I play in a sitting position, was to find a new
shape of guitar that would allow me to have at the same time
- both my feet flat on the ground,
- my shoulders relaxed on a horizontal line,
- my spine straight and vertical (like a good position for a pianist), while having the neck of the instrument raised to the height and angle that would be the most natural ,the least straining ,for a comfortable and efficient playing position (the position advised by all classical teachers!)”
Maybe it’s not all about attracting the chicks.