Here is a fine example of instant Repetitive Strain Injury. Tremolo playing was popular among some early players of the Classic Style and one of its finest exponents was Alfred Farland.

Farland, as you know, was the big tremolo player in the US. But what did his tremolo really sound like?

I have been sent an extremely rare recording of “Serenade”, as composed by Moritz Moskowski,(1854-1925).

 

 This piece by Farland, was cut in 1917 and never issued. It was thought lost forever. Turns out it was broadcast on the web about a decade ago. The recording is from the lone Diamond Disc copy made from the master. Both master and copy reside in the Thomas Edison archives, where the broadcast originated.  There are no other copies anywhere.

 

 

I like a little tremolo in the odd piece “for effect” but find whole pieces played using the technique a little wearying.

 

Farland suffered from what would now be described as Repetitive Strain Injury, possibly due to the extensive use of finger tremolo in his playing. This caused him to change from fingerstyle to plectrum style, but was never as successful as he had previously been.

 

SERENADE by Moritz Moskowski

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Pretty scary, that. My fingers would simply burst into flame after a few bars.

Compare this to Eddie Peabody's recording of "Il Trovatore", made only a few years later (plectrum style on a plectrum banjo).

Farland had to play with enough force to fill a theatre with sound and to do this with no help from a microphone. I think there is less danger of injury or pain or even discomfort if one plays with moderate force. 

I agree with Mr. Stecher. It's funny how even the sound of a  Mastertone can be swallowed up by what's going on around you. And of course, you compensate by picking harder. The year I lived in Nashville, giging as much as I could and practicing even more, I started to feel the effects. Tingling, lack of feeling, throbbing pain, tremors. I had to change my attitude and relax. My mantra: "The banjo is loud enough bro. Your the only one who wants it louder".  Stretching and relaxing in all my playing has staved off any long term effects. And it improved my playing.

It seems that RSI is not "effort" related but repetition related, so playing finger tremolo regularly either, loudly or softly, may both cause the same problem.

Quote:

Causes of repetitive strain injury (RSI) 

Repetitive strain injury (RSI) is related to the overuse of muscles and tendons in the upper body, especially the hands, wrists, forearms, elbows, shoulders, back or neck.

Things that can put you at risk of RSI include:

  • repetitive activities
  • doing a high-intensity activity for a long time without rest
  • poor posture or activities that require you to work in an awkward position

Cold temperatures and vibrating equipment are also thought to increase the risk of getting RSI and can make the symptoms worse. Stress can also be a contributing factor.

RSI is most commonly caused by a repeated action carried out on a daily basis. A variety of jobs can lead to RSI, such as working at an assembly line, at a supermarket checkout or typing at a computer.

This is an interesting and important topic.

Why do you think that using the thumb and fingers to pluck the banjo strings in the usual way is safe but tremolo is dangerous? Surely a banjo player repeats the same finger motions over and over when playing the normal non-tremolo classic banjo repertoire.

I think it is likely that there is a harmful and a harmless way of playing single finger tremolo on a musical string. The setar players of Iran all play single finger tremolo and they do it for several hours every day without injury, and on steel strings. Some have played for 60 years and more.

I am no expert on muscles and tendons but I do know from experience that I make repetitive motions daily without injuring myself. I personally know those who *have* injured themselves through repetitive stress and they all say it was from making repetitive motions in an ergonomically inefficient way, and often in a way that feels uncomfortable. 25 years ago I did the same thing to myself but not from playing banjo. And then again two years ago I did it again!  I learned (maybe!)  the hard way that the key to not causing RSI is awareness/attention. 

If and when I pay attention I find that forceful finger tremolo on the banjo feels uncomfortable and that doing the same motion with moderate force feels comfortable.

I have met several classical guitar players who have injured *both* hands from playing "Correctly" instead of playing sensibly. 

Tremelo playing was very popular, Farland ended his playing career using a leather plectrum strapped to his hand, presumably because he had destroyed his fingers with too much tremelo. I have never bothered too much with this technique, I like to play 'Jeannie with the Light Brown Ale' in this style, but I only do it for my own amusement. My favourite picture of Farland was featured in the ABF 'Five Stringer' some years ago, it shows Alf and his wife Carrie, when he was pretty old, he had a thick head of white hair. His personal life was quite tragic, he ended his days selling tickets in a cinema, and one of his sons murdered someone. He lived near Van Eps in Orange, Van Eps said that you could hear Farland practising on his banjo all day, I'm glad that I didn't live next door. Farland's recordings are rare except for 'Tripping Through the Meadow' a box of his cylinders was found some years ago but they were affected by mould growth, and the finder tried to clean them and ruined them in the process.

Farland does not impress as a reasonable person. He was a proponent of the idea that metal should not be included in banjo construction because it imparts a metallic sound. I have had 2 Farland banjos, both very good but whose necks were a bit narrow for my hand. They were not metal clad. They did have metal brackets and a metal bezel. They each had a beveled pot instead of a tone ring and sure enough they sounded wonderful. But the original head of these banjos was not a vellum. No indeed.  The heads were made of metal!  Does this make sense? 

By the way, my Windsor Grand Solo which uses the bevel idea, but improves the design, sounds better to me than the Farland banjos did. Just as my Clifford Essex XX ("the Whyte Laydie on steroids")  sounds better to me than most American Whyte Laydies do. I am American, and have no pro-English chauvinistic agenda. I just think the Brits improved American banjo designs and especially they improved aspects of  how they were built. 

Richard William Ineson said:

Tremelo playing was very popular, Farland ended his playing career using a leather plectrum strapped to his hand, presumably because he had destroyed his fingers with too much tremelo. I have never bothered too much with this technique, I like to play 'Jeannie with the Light Brown Ale' in this style, but I only do it for my own amusement. My favourite picture of Farland was featured in the ABF 'Five Stringer' some years ago, it shows Alf and his wife Carrie, when he was pretty old, he had a thick head of white hair. His personal life was quite tragic, he ended his days selling tickets in a cinema, and one of his sons murdered someone. He lived near Van Eps in Orange, Van Eps said that you could hear Farland practising on his banjo all day, I'm glad that I didn't live next door. Farland's recordings are rare except for 'Tripping Through the Meadow' a box of his cylinders was found some years ago but they were affected by mould growth, and the finder tried to clean them and ruined them in the process.

Wow!  Farland playing the way he was famous for (at least, he claimed he was famous).

Despite Stewart's unhealthy obsession with him (we will cut him some slack as SSS was having health problems including a stroke) Farland had difficulty selling tickets.  He was also criticized for not having "carrying power"-- he was considered a weak player.  He was the "classical banjo" movement all by himself.  The trouble was that most folks did not want to hear classical music even if it was novel to play it on the banjo.

Eli published a great article in the 5 Stringer on Farland (what?!  You are not a member of the ABF?) along with some music.

Tremolo was very popular. (has anyone tried "Converse's Tremolo Waltz"?)  It was also criticized as not suitable for concert work and being overused.  I use it for a variation in "Home Sweet Home"  and people tend to like it when I do.

This is actually a pleasant recording and the playing is very good.  He sounds strong too.  I can see the attraction to this in the late 1880s-90s.  It is interesting and very different from the normal schottisches that were overwhelmingly common.

It is as far from "characteristic banjo music" as you could get. 

my heroe , Joe Wright destroy his finger at    1.24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpqzjw8RF64

It is funny how in the films of Tarrant Bailey JR, Vess and Van Eps Trio they make playing look effortless, whereas modern rock, blues, etc., guitarists make playing look terribly painful.  The act of pushing a string (or in this case moving a piece of steel) looks like the most excruciation move that the player can do.

Does anyone know when musicians start acting like playing is painful?  Was it the 1960s?

Roy Clark does not act like it hurts him to play.


marc dalmasso said:

my heroe , Joe Wright destroy his finger at    1.24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpqzjw8RF64

Paganini (1782 to 1840) did a lot of thrashing about on stage. he threw his hair this way and that, and the same goes for the hair of his violin bow. He broke strings on purpose and continued to play.  He made facial contortions. 

It's funny that electric guitar set up for rock music is very easy to play. the strings are thin and loose. The neck is typically small and the strings rather close together. Compare that to the club-necked L-5 guitar that Eddie Lang used to play with extremely heavy strings, in the 1920s. Or compare that to the dreadnought guitars that min-century acoustic country and bluegrass musicians used to play, usually with Mapes brand heavy gauge strings. It hurt like hell to play and the musicians, regardless of gender, never showed it.

Long time reader and first time poster; I’ve greatly appreciated and enjoyed this site for quite a while now, from its amazingly thorough music and recording archives to the instructional/performance videos and the refreshingly polite and cordial tone set by its kind webmaster and the civilized discussions by the regulars therein. Thanks so much to everyone involved for doing it.

I’m wading into the Farland discussion only because I think I can supply something of actual value — a couple of the supposedly lost early cylinder recordings which I discovered as part of the International Guitar Research Archives at California State University. They seem to be acoustic 78 transfers of the cylinders, deposited, I believe, by Zahr Myron Bickford, with whom Farland was in correspondence late in his life. The staff there made audio transcriptions of the 78s for me for a fee, but I had to do a lot of speed correction and clean up and the files they sent. Even so, they sound pretty crappy. Maybe someone here might have better luck. If you listen closely, you can even hear someone (Bickford?) moving around while the cylinder warbles through; one a Paganini Caprice and the other a transcription of the most famous of Brahms’ Hungarian Dances.

Anyway, I hope that the assembled will find these as interesting as I did despite their wretched sound quality. Poor Farland hasn’t been treated exactly fairly, I don’t think — he was really the shining early star of the fingerstyle banjo and after Horace Weston’s death was Stewart’s priceless commercial ambassador, traveling all over the nation and playing to great reviews, it seems, everywhere. The banjoist Paul Cadwell had very kind words to say about him as late as 1969 in the New Yorker, calling him “the greatest of them all … Van Eps (Cadwell’s teacher and friend) belittled him, but I heard him in his prime, and I defy anyone to do better.”

I’m also attaching a letter from Farland to Bickford’s wife (the only bit of their Farland-ania digitized by CSUN the last time I checked) which I find very moving, and I think pretty much everyone else here will, too.

Thanks again for such a great site and for offering up all the interesting information and conversations.

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