How to practice

The best way to practice Trill would be to start by counting beats and play a relatively slow row of down pickings, where in between, you try to touch the vibrating string three or more times. What your fingers do is exactly the same as it was in Tekieh: keeping the finger for the main note firm while only touching the string with the next finger, as we are not looking for the sound of the next tone but only a vibratory effect on the main tone itself.

After getting comfortable with a trill on the first-finger notes on every string, do the same exercise for the second-finger notes.

Normally we play Trill-Tak with down picks, but it is also doable with the up picking.

We can also perform trill in certain musical phrases by alternating between the main and lower tones in the scale. Mansour Nariman has termed it “reversed trill”.