Robert Fripp - Guitar Technique

Guitar Technique

See also: New standard tuning and Guitar Craft

Fripp began playing guitar at the age of eleven. When he started, he was tone deaf and had no rhythmical sense, weaknesses which led him later to comment "Music so wishes to be heard that it sometimes calls on unlikely characters to give it voice."

While being taught guitar basics by his teacher Don Strike, Fripp began to develop the technique of crosspicking, which became one of his specialties. Fripp teaches crosspicking to his students in Guitar Craft.

In 1985, Fripp began using a tuning he called "New Standard tuning", which would also become popularised in Guitar Craft.

Fripp's guitar technique, unlike most rock guitarists of his era, is not blues-based but rather influenced by avant-garde jazz and European classical music, combining rapid alternate picking with motifs employing whole-tone or diminished pitch structures, continuous cross-picked (and polka-influenced) sixteenth-note patterns for long stretches in a form called moto perpetuo (perpetual motion).

Fripp is left-handed, but plays guitar right-handed.