I'm a big Rush fan and play almost exclusively finger style. I've heard a lot of talk about his technique and have had an inkling of what Geddy was doing on more recent albums with his flamenco-style strumming (one finger with a sort of open-close movement for double strokes) but it always seemed kind of gimmicky. I screwed around with it enough to realize it was handy for when I was feeling slow or tired and needed to do some 16ths but never really got comfortable with it. I've also heard Rob from Metallica say he uses it sometimes to rest during really grueling parts.
Over the holiday break I spent a lot of time playing, and after watching a better video of that RRHOF video of Geddy doing Roundabout with Yes, I decided to try and learn it and it eventually clicked. Now after a week or two of practicing and playing "will it flamenco?" on a bunch of stuff, I'm coming to the conclusion this is a serious tool, but it seems like lots of people would be doing this instead of it being something you can name a handful of players doing on a handful of songs so why isn't it more popular? It's also super intuitive I don't have to think about if I want to go up or down or whatever, and probably couldn't tell you if I tried.
Over the holiday break I spent a lot of time playing, and after watching a better video of that RRHOF video of Geddy doing Roundabout with Yes, I decided to try and learn it and it eventually clicked. Now after a week or two of practicing and playing "will it flamenco?" on a bunch of stuff, I'm coming to the conclusion this is a serious tool, but it seems like lots of people would be doing this instead of it being something you can name a handful of players doing on a handful of songs so why isn't it more popular? It's also super intuitive I don't have to think about if I want to go up or down or whatever, and probably couldn't tell you if I tried.
