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.