finger rolling

[airrick]

do any of you have a problem with finger rolling with your pinky, i can do it with all my fingers but not my pinky, what about you? What aobut some excercises to get this down

[Sagaris]

I tried learning rolling all four fingers once but it just seemed impossible and very hard to grasp. I'm not great but not bad at rolling my three fingers without my pinky. I'd have thought a good exercise would be just to do four very slowly for a while and get some strength in the pinky perhaps?

Well I won't be learning it for a while anyway .

[Vampyre]

what's finger rolling?

[Fire-Starter]

Originally Posted by Vampyre

what's finger rolling?

You use it to roll back and forth (like violine players do) to get vibrato, vs the bending the string up and down like you do on a fretted bass. I believe the rolling is not as harsh on your fretless vs the bending you do on fretted basses which, if you did on a fretless, would do more damage on your fretboard because you have no fretts.

I think I got it right

[Lokire]

I thought that rolling was with your picking hand. Where you would play in a fluid motion going RMIMRMIMRMIM...etc.

R=Ring Finger
M=Middle Finger
I=Index Finger

It's like a flamenco / classical guitarist technique. I think...

[airrick]

what i'm talking about is when you, with your left hand, have to play a note on the next (higher only) string, so you bend your last knukle without the other ones bending to play the other note. edit: only with notes on same fret as one you are rolling your finger from

[SullyB]

I have the same problem, airrick. The first knuckle on my pinkie bends back a bit and sometimes "locks" so that it stays straight. I especially have troble "rolling" from the second degree of a major scale to the fifth degree of a major scale. I think that the best thing to do is focus on using as much of your finger-tip as possible, so that you don't have to "roll" as much. Also, work with a metronome at a very slow pace. I mean 60 BPM and even slower. Gary Willis, on his website www.garywillis.com, suggests going as slow as 30 BPM!

Good luck, bro. Let us know how it goes.

[airrick]

no kidding, i hate it when me middle pinky locks, well i asked my teacher and it's all a matter of strenghening your pinky muscles, so i leave you to grab a tennis ball

[Mark Wilson]

I use my entire arm to grab that vibrato on my fretless. I do it from my elbow. So I don't really have a problem with my pinky.

Also, how are you doing it? Are you swelling it? Like...Bringing it from slightly flat, to natural, to slightly sharp then back down. Not fast of anything. Slow sounds alot better.


-Mark

[Bass2Live]

I've just started working on finger rolling and I can seem to get any finger to do it. I'm trying to learn it through a book and I just can seem to get a good grasp on how the technique works. Anyone know where I can find a video of someone rolling on the internet?

Thanks,
Trigg