“My mom says that too. But then she gets weird about it.”
“Weird how?”
“Like she wants me to play but doesn’t want me to care too much. Does that make sense?”
“Parents worry. It’s their job.”
“I guess.” She finds another harmonic, this one on the third fret, subtle but there. “Oh! There’s one here too!”
“Good ear. That one’s harder to find.”
We work through harmonics for another ten minutes, then I show her how to incorporate them into the progressions she already knows. Her face lights up when she realizes she can end a phrase with a harmonic instead of a regular note.
“It’s like punctuation,” she says. “Like an exclamation point instead of a period.”
“Exactly. Music is language. Same rules apply.”
“My teacher never explains it like that.”
“Everyone teaches differently.”
“Yeah, but you teach like someone who actually plays. Not just someone who learned to teach from a book about teaching.”
Smart kid. Maybe too smart.
“Want to learn something else?”
“Yes.”
“This is called a hammer-on.”
I demonstrate the technique, fretting a note then hammering another finger down to create the second note without picking again. She watches intently, her eyes tracking every movement.
“It’s like the note appears from nowhere,” she says.
“Try it.”
She attempts it, but the second note barely sounds.
“More force on the hammer. Really smack it down.”
She tries again. Better.
“It’s harder than it looks.”
“Everything worth doing is.”
She practices the hammer-on for a few minutes, gradually getting cleaner sound. Then without me showing her, she figures out the opposite technique.
“Nice, what you just did is called a pull-off. Try it again.”
She does, and while it’s messy, the fact that she intuited its existence shows me she’s thinking about music, not just copying.
“Pull down slightly as you release,” I explain. “Not just lifting off. You want to kind of pluck the string with the finger that’s leaving.”
She tries again. Better. On the third attempt, she gets it clean.
“This changes everything,” she says. “I can play so many more notes without picking them all.”
