Playing Clean

Herb Ohta Jr. is the King of Clean on the ‘ukulele. I was watching him perform with Daniel Ho in Sacramento and I realized just how clean he plays. I heard one or two notes in the whole show that sounded like they were on the edge of not-clean. That’s it! So of course I came home all pumped up. It was a great show and I got to see Daniel play for the first time, but I also realized that listening to someone play super clean is like floating.

After studying my ‘ukulele playing and how I try to play clean, here are some things I find help make things click.

• Make sure that your fingers are in between the frets. Seems pretty basic, but if I am playing fast, sometimes I lose sight of how my  finger needs to sit right between the frets. I’m not saying that your finger has to be exactly in the middle of two frets, but it shouldn’t be touching them either.
• Push down hard enough that notes sound clearly. Again, in moderation. You don’t need the string to be up against the wood, but you want to avoid the sitar sound. This is important if you are doing hammer-ons, because too often the “hammer” never connects with the “on”.
• Keep your unused fingers out of the way.
• Make sure your picking hand is in sync with your fretting hand. If one side is off it will be that much harder to avoid “buzz”.
• Slow down. Once you can play it slow and clean, then you can speed it up until you are back at the original tempo. A metronome might help with this.
• Sometimes, if you are doing a lot of open-string stuff you will get some weird intervals that sound less than great. This is especially true with 7ths – letting a B note ring while you play C is not going to sound very good in most cases. So mute the 7th before you play the root!
• You can keep the strings you are not playing quiet by placing your palm, thumb, or unused fingers on them.
• Don’t pick as hard. If you are playing some Jake-crazy loud thing, the odds are it doesn’t sound as good as would with a little less picking power. Picking harder causes the string to vibrate in bigger arcs, which gives it a better chance of buzzing off the fretboard.
• Try palm muting sometimes, it will tighten everything up and make your playing sound more precise.
• Think a little ahead and you will know where you might go next, making it easier to get there.

When I asked Uncle Herb about this, he said that the only thing he really thinks about is playing clean when he is performing. Maybe that’s it.

~Brad