Hi Stacey, no it’s not really optimal but as it’s not something that I commonly have to do it’s OK, if I had to play like that all of the time it wouldn’t be sustainable. If I had something to learn that involved that sort of stretch often then I would probably try to play it in a different position if possible; if not I would look at playing it in a different key to see if it would be better.
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I am working on a concept that suggests this is a misconception.
If the strength only comes from our fingers we are not using our bodies properly.
If we think of moving from our center (physically and spiritually), these movements become more grounded and firm. This might be the “hara” for lack of a better term.
“In Chinese and Japanese martial arts, hara is also known as the lower Dantian or “Sea of Qi”. It’s considered the body’s vital center and center of gravity, and the source of vital energy or Yuan Qi. Many martial arts styles, including Aikido, emphasize the importance of “moving from the hara”, or moving from the center of one’s being.”
Even the moment of our fingers on the fretboard can be applied in this way, such that you imagine pressing the string not with a squeeze or pinch of the fingers, but rather a pull to one’s center of energy. Not directly towards it, but with the intent.
Additionally, as in martial training, such movements are not “to the target” (fretboard) but “through the target” such as past the fretboard and into our hand with the intent of follow through to the center.
I saw a brief segment of a lesson on slurs (a free ad by Tonebase) which discussed this. In only a few tries the impact of my hammer ons and stability of my pull offs have improved a bit. Not because I am stronger, but because my intent is more directed. Now all I need is aim…
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Hi Stacy! I wanted to respond to a few of your questions for other players. As you know, I’m also a beginner, so I don’t pretend to have “the answers”. If anyone has any advice on what I’m doing, please don’t be shy in sharing it!
For reference: my palm is about the same size as yours, my fingers about 1/16 inch shorter, my widest stretch thumb to pinky about 7.5 inches.
My acoustic guitar as 1.75 inch nut, my electric is 1.63 inches.
When you say “thumb on the neck”, do you mean behind the neck? If so, no, the neck does not settle into that curve of the thumb. I think you can see this in the photos below. The only time I come close to nestling the neck is when I reach around to mute the low E, for example playing open D or A. Even then, I try to avoid it. EDIT TO ADD: Haha, I was just practicing a picking song I’ve been working on and found myself cradling the neck in that thumb area. In this case, I’m fingering string 1 fret 3 with my pinky, and string 2 fret 3 with my ring finger. The neck naturally falls into that cradle, AND I notice I naturally mute string 6 with my thumb. Not sure why. I think the takeaway is, though, that how we hold the neck is dynamic, depending on what we’re doing now, and what we’re doing next.
Also: I rarely find my palm is parallel to the floor. I’m guessing that’s happening because you hold the guitar neck parallel to the floor? I did that for a long time, and found that it forced my wrist to bend too much. I now use a strap when sitting or standing so I don’t fall into that habit. I also slouch less (sitting) when I angle the neck up a bit. Not as much as classical position. In the past couple of weeks I’ve been playing standing a lot, and really enjoying it…I find I’m not fighting the guitar body so much.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re describing, but I can say the position of my palm relative to the neck changes depending on the chord.
Here are two photos of a G chord. Some fingers curl, others not so much! Also, my wrist is bent, but not much. Finally I think you can see the neck is nowhere near the curve of my thumb. (I’d include more photos, but find it really difficult to take photos of myself fretting chords.)
I find that moving my elbow around helps. If my wrist is too bent, I think I move my elbow away from my body.
I think as we progress, we’ll have better hand/finger control, and things will fall into place.
You also mentioned something about strength. At the beginning, Justin really focused on strengthening that thumb muscle in preparation for the F chord. I’m thinking we’ve both accomplished that by now! Like most beginners, I have had (and still have) a tendency to use a death grip on the neck. I’m now trying to lighten my touch, only depressing the strings as much as needed for them to ring true. Believe me, I have a LONG way to go. Ironically, I tend to press harder as I fatigue. I also press harder when learning a new song, or trying to speed up tempo. I guess it’s all part of the journey.
This is how I’m working through the small hand challenge. I still have many issues, not least of which is accidentally muting the high E when trying to thumb mute the low E.
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My grip is very similar, I bend the fingers more and wrist less. All my palm knuckles are the same distance from the neck.
@judi, what is the width of that Guitars neck at the nut please.
Judi @judi, thank you for starting this thread, and Stacy @artax_2, thank you for suggesting it.
There’s so much I’d like to contribute to the discussion, especially after so many others have added the great stuff that they have, but it would be a monster post for me to do it all at once, so I’ll do it in pieces over time.
I wouldn’t necessarily have said I have small hands and that that is the source of my challenges, but it probably is a factor. I’m about 167cm (5’6") in height, and I expect my hands are proportionately sized.
I find some of the ways we measure things to be puzzlingly unhelpful as compared to the way we actually use them. I can very comfortably span my hand from pinky to thumb at 20cm (8") and stretch to 21.5cm (8.5"). But when do we use our hands that way while playing guitar? It seems to me that the distance between the tips of the index finger and pinky is more relevant, no? With straightened fingers, that’s 15-16cm (5.9-6.3") for me. Even more relevant, I’d think it would be the index-pinky-tip distance with our fingers curled more like if we were fretting strings on a guitar. For me, completely curled, that’s only about 6cm (2.4") or 8cm (3.1") with discomfort. With my fingers in a “claw-like” posture, probably closer to a fretting position, I can get ~7.7cm (3") to ~9cm (3.5) uncomfortably.
A huge part of my challenge is that my pinky angles sharply toward my ring finger. Much but not all of that angle is happening at its base knuckle, i.e. my palm knuckles never align in a plane, so the pinky’s knuckle tilts forward and creates a “cupping” of my palm at that edge. This effect increases when I curl my fingers. I work a lot on stretching, and that does help, but I doubt I’ll ever get this to become completely flat.
Rogier @roger_holland, I’ve been doing those stretching exercises and others for months and will continue, but eventually we’re limited by our anatomy. (Then we have to find ways to do the most we can with what we have.)
It’s obvious then (or it should be) that choosing a guitar that “fits” you is imperative. That’s nearly impossible for a true beginner, but don’t they say that we shouldn’t expect our first guitar to be our “forever guitar?” I live in a fairly small town with two very small shops that sell guitars. Even if I played all of their guitars, I wouldn’t have a very good sample of what’s available in the larger world.
When we evaluate the size of a guitar’s neck, here again I wonder if our measuring method is sufficient. I see neck with at nut/body, neck depth at 1/2 fret and 12-1/2 fret, and a “neck shape.” I wonder if the circumference at different frets would be more meaningful; after all, we need to “get our hands around” the neck, so including that total distance might be more helpful.
I gambled and bought a PRS SE DGT (online), knowing that I really didn’t know what I was doing. I like the guitar very much, but I don’t know (after 8 months) whether it fits me well or whether it doesn’t. These are its parameters:
Neck Width at Nut: 42.06cm (1 21/32")
Neck width at Body: 56.337cm (2 7/32")
Neck Depth at 1/2 Fret: 21.41cm (27/32")
Neck Depth at 12 1/2 Fret: 24.20cm (61/64")
Is that too large given my left hand’s size and range? Would I have an easier time with another guitar? I can’t say I have any idea. It’s summer, so garden and backpacking are dominating my time. I try to squeeze in 30 to 60 minutes of playing every day, but I can’t fit in a trip to a guitar store to try smaller necks. That will have to wait until autumn. If anyone here has opinions about whether my guitar is/isn’t right for me and/or what other guitars (electric or acoustic) might be better, I welcome the feedback.
There are so many other things I want to address here… Classical position. I really like it, but I haven’t figured out how to do it and also sit comfortably. Where do my legs go and so on. Maybe I need a different seat. As @judi mentioned, standing is the best position for me in every way - except for feet and legs getting tired during longer sessions.
Wrist angles. The F chord is the worst, because it’s a compound angle. At the far (low) end of the neck, my forearm is angling away from my body to the left more than it will anywhere else on the neck. Add the reach across the fretboard, and my wrist is now signicantly tilted on 2 different axes - and it very much does not like that. Imagine the wrist bent as in the photo from @DarrellW above, but adding the angle toward the headstock, too. If only the neck could be shaped in an arc… I haven’t fully explored experimenting with my elbow position to try to reduce the impact on my wrist, so I’m hopeful that this may lead me to something that works better. Any other bar chord is easier than F; a G major bar chord is 10 times easier. It’s that compound angle down at the nut that gets me. I broke my left wrist very severely at age 18, and I have to think that limits both its range of motion and comfort.
Joshua @Jamolay, I appreciate you bringing “hara” into the discussion. That concept is new to me, but it seems like it fits well with what I was trying to get at in another thread here. In a matter of a few months, it has become very apparent that - at least for me - the tactile/mindfulness pieces of this practice are not only very interesting but essential to my improvement in all facets of playing. I have no way of knowing what other people do, but I suspect that @sclay was right when he said in another thread that 99.x% of us are probably applying more force than is necessary. After hand stretches, the first thing I do in my practice is a “minimum touch” exercise that I got from Tomo Fujita. When I do it, I also incorporate Justin’s minimum movement.
Stacy @artax_2, I do quite a bit of “single-note” playing - arpeggios and simple songs - and I do find that I don’t have these kinds of challenges with those, so I do think it’s primarily about chords. That makes sense to me, because we’re asking many or all of our fingers to do their parts at the same time, and that’s what makes it difficult.
That’s already too much, so I’ll save my other pieces for a future post.
Another way to look at this is not “more force than necessary” but force applied the wrong way. If I am using poor mechanics to apply a force, it is hard and I risk being hurt. If I apply the same force correctly, it is easier to do and easier on my body.
I feel the biggest risk is us new players sorting out how to use our bodies to play this contraption. We slowly figure out better ways to apply force and position ourselves holding the guitar or placing our fingers. But like any learned thing, it takes time and practice. In the meantime we are at risk, so need to be attentive to overuse and strain.
I don’t really know much at all about martial arts and the “hara” concept. I learned about it a lifetime ago studying Shiatsu massage in Boulder Colorado. Pressure to meridian points applied with intent from the center is stronger, steadier, easier and more meditative and therefore healing. It was noticeable to practice this, and pretty dang amazing. I kind of wish I had thought more about this a couple of years ago.
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In reading all these posts I’m beginning to wonder if this is purely our own minds playing tricks.
As @Jamolay said, he prefers a wide neck guitar but has smaller span than I do. 7.5 vs 8.0 yet, I find the reach of my little finger on the A min pentatonic a stretch that is just about OK with a good twist up on my wrist.
So just how much of this is just us, so to speak. Interesting read for sure.
I have relatively short fingers and (this may be heresy here) but I find that if I can’t reach something by stretch I just move my hand. For example, there is a passage in Justin’s tutorial of Little Wing where he reaches a note by stretch whereas I slide up to that note moving the whole hand. Similarly in the Am pentatonic to get the note with my pinky on the low E I find I move my hand. It’s not something I’m conscious of just how I developed. You have to be quick with your hand but that comes with experience.
There is one other issue in that the neck contributes to the tone so what you gain in playability you lose in tone with a skinny neck. I favour 50’s spec electrics that tend to have necks like baseball bats.
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I think Peter brings up a good point. I remember struggling early on because my fingers seemed unable to do what Justin’s fingers can on the guitar.
Much of this is years of practice and use, very little is probably anatomy, although there will be differences between very different hand sizes, of course.
The point is, there are no rigid rules. You find a way to play using what you have. Over time, some stretch and coordination will improve your ability, but if it is hard to do one way, or the way someone else does it, find a different way.
We can alter fingerings and most importantly, we can CHANGE THE MUSIC.
Play a chord variation you can actually play. Play in a different part of the fretboard. Change the key. Whatever works for you is fine as long as the result sounds good. Good does not mean identical to as presented.
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While I definitely agree that there are ways around the issues we’re discussing here, I perceive that most of them are advanced. I can’t yet simply find another way to play a chord, I’m doing good to play a clear chord in the regular shape, let alone explore where to find another configuration of the one I’m just learning. I don’t have the skill yet to go note hunting. Or the desire, to be honest. I believe you when you say it’s years of experience that leads to this ability.
There is a frustrating thing that I see happening every day over on the guitar reddits, where advanced players seem to have forgotten what it was like to be a beginner. Their advice is always a well-intended “practice more” without any actual advice on what that could look like. I understand most beginners need an in-person teacher. But alas, none of us would be on Justin Guitar if we all did that. I’m not saying this is happening in this community, in fact I usually see the opposite.
But I will say, to small handed beginners, the suggestion to “find a way” and “just change the music” leaves us (at least me) perplexed for what do to. 90% of the fretboard is still a mystery to me. 75% of what ive learned about guitar in 2 years doing Justin’s course is conceptual because the application of even baby technique is hard. Eventually, I may be able to make my own version of things, but in the meantime, I’m just trying not to hurt myself.
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I apologize, I didn’t mean you should be able to do any of these things now, I certainly can’t change a song yet, at all. I try to finger chords in the way I can and occasionally use a partial or “mini” chord and futz around until I feel ok about it.
My point was not to feel discouraged because there are many ways to solve problems and we will get there.
Still, we start from the beginning and have to work within our current physical and mental abilities, and as you say, without getting hurt. I do know I have had to abandon some pieces I tried to learn, having to admit to myself that I don’t have the capability to play them…yet.
No need to apologize! This is all great, informative, and interesting discussion. The exact thing we’re needing on this topic.
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Stacy could you give us more specific things you are struggling with?
You’ve mentioned the minor pentatonic scale having trouble reaching the E string with your pinky. Try playing it this way. Start with you ring finger on the note A the play the note C on the A string with you’re index finger then the note D with you ring finger and the slide up to the note E then play the rest of the scall the usual way.
This is a legitimate way to play the scale, Eric Clapton plays it this way and it’s how I first learnt it in the 70s.
If I didn’t explain this clear enough let me know and I’ll try and explain it better.
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This is one of those posts that I wish I had an option to “like” more than just +1. Several great points here.
I do believe that time and experience will ultimately get us to where these things become routine and comfortable. I have to believe that. But we’re at a stage where we can see that something(s) needs to change, we’re not exactly sure what that is, and we have a limited toolbox for making changes. One thing I do is to avoid reddit.
As Peter @rorystrat mentioned, I frequently have to shift my hand slightly to reach notes, the low C on the Am pentatonic being a great example. Rick @stitch, your alternate pattern is a fine suggestion. I recently stumbled across “diagonal” (3+2) pentatonic scales and have really been enjoying those. In addition to being more comfortable, I feel like they’re giving me a lot more exposure to the fretboard and building agility and dexterity in ways that the boxes don’t. But, as Stacy said, if we’re primarily following Justin’s system (which is excellent), we’re mostly left either to “just keep trying.”
I’ve been working hard to play “Dock of the Bay” for at least a couple of months. It’s mostly very solid, except for where the F chord comes in. There, I have to jump from G to F, then to D. I know I could use an alternate F chord, but I’d like to use this song as my platform for improving the full F. The challenge in going from G to F (in time) is mostly the usual beginner stuff: landing all the fingers in the right places with the right force, but there’s also a huge element of wrist position to prevent injury. But then, going from F to D… That involves a 90-degree rotation of the wrist and movement of the hand from the lowest strings to the highest. That trio ends up being pretty rough on my wrist after a few rounds.
Here’s the thing about thumb placement and orientation for me: Having my thumb near the middle of the neck and pointed “upward” (perpendicular to the neck) causes the line of palm knuckles of my fingers to angle away from the neck so that the index palm knuckle is closest and the pinky knuckle is farthest. This gives my shortest finger the longest distance to reach, and the only way I can do it is to crank my wrist in such a way to bring that side of my hand up near the neck. But if I point my thumb more toward the headstock, my hand rotates enough to realign the palm knuckles so they’re parallel to the neck. Alternatively, (in some situations) bringing my thumb up toward the top of the neck (by the low E string) moves my whole hand closer to the neck, accomplishing the same thing for the pinky. I’m slowly finding places to incorporate one or the other of these “techniques” as needed.
I’ve seen Richard @Richard_close2u say that pointing the thumb toward the headstock is “bad form,” and I’ll take his word for it. At the same time, I’m not planning to enter any “good form” contests, so I’m more interested in knowing how doing it will inhibit my progress. I don’t do it at all times or even most of the time, but there are reaches that I find very difficult or even painful without it.
Finally (for this post), I wonder if what Joshua @Jamolay is saying about the wider neck being more comfortable could be due to what I just said above about the pinky’s palm knuckle being too far from the neck when my thumb is near the middle. Could a wider neck (paradoxically) be the solution? Something to explore in the mythical guitar shop.
I don’t subscribe to this idea either. My thumb moves all over the back of the neck from hanging over the top to pointing at the headstock to planted below the middle of the neck. Sometimes you just gotta do what works.
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Amen.
If it were the solution, there wouldn’t be so many skinny chick’n necked guitars. There are trade offs. No thumb over option for me. Also, like longer scales, wider necks increase some types of stretches.
On my steel string, I am learning a B7b9 which I like best with the root on 7th fret 6 th string. But what a stretch for me! Ring finger 6 string 7th, little on 4th string 7th, middle on 3rd string 5th and index 2nd string 4th. Thank goodness it starts at the 7th fret. I couldn’t do this at all on my classical, simply not an option since the nut is 5mm wider and the scale is 5/8” longer. If I tried on a 44 mm or 42 mm nut, it would be easier still.
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I do this too. One problem I have with my thumb is forgetting to move it.
How you point your thumb and where it is behind the neck definitely influences where the fingers can get to. I tend to leave the thumb behind at the last fingering position while I try and screw my other fingers into place. Not a good habit. Once I notice and place my thumb better, my odds increase substantially.
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To your point about sitting position… I tried classical too and my strumming arm hates it. I simply don’t put the guitar in the center of my seated position. However, tilting the neck up…my fretting arm and hand benefits from that. It took months to get used to it though. MONTHS. I have to keep all guitars with straps on them when sitting down. And I still sometimes find one of my electrics suffers from neck dive, the one with locking tuners. And I no longer leave my string tuner clipped on the headstock all the time. I don’t need the extra tiny bit of weight on the headstock.
I will say, the forum discussed awhile back another similar topic that I grappled with - sitting position, as it relates to wrist position and overall comfort. I hypothesized that what I call the “male” sitting position (sitting naturally with knees wide apart as opposed to a lady position of knees together or crossed) resulted in the guitar being placed further to the right of our body center, bringing the fretting arm closer into the body, giving better positioning for the fretting hand. It’s subtle but I think ‘manspreading’ make a difference, especially compared to petite ladies.
While there are plenty of exceptions where petite women sit with the guitar on their crossed knees with no hindrance whatsoever, I still feel like bringing my right knee to point out to the right does something. It orients the guitar face out rightwards a little and the fretboard likewise, moving it outward a little in front of my body, seems to be a good angle for my wrist and arm to be straighter on the horizontal plane during my tough chords and note picking.
I think Justin does this too but he’s sitting angled so that the guitar is facing th camera straight on, instead of himself. It didn’t dawn on me early on that that was going on. Mimicking Justin has gotten me in some trouble with sitting and guitar positioning, when I wasn’t playing close enough attention.
ETA- a fantastic rock guitarist that always practices in classical position is John 5. He’s inspiring, in my opinion, for getting comfy with that position. And he plays with his guitar higher on the body than a lot of others.