It’s also a matter of experimentation. You need to finger a D chord, say, and pluck one string at a time. If one or more strings are muted, you have to slightly adjust the position of your fingers, your hand, your wrist, perhaps your guitar neck, basically anything and everything, to see if you can get all strings sounding clean. Often only a very small adjustment is necessary.
A couple of other things: the fingertips (the distal phalanx, the last segment of your finger) should be perpendicular to the fretboard, very perpendicular. You have to cut your fingernails on the fretting hand short in order to achieve this.
Once you find the position that works, then you should start working on changes to and from that chord (not before).
Completely new guitar student here, and finding these chords remarkably difficult to play cleanly. As I experiment with finger and hand placement I came up with a few questions.
Wrt wrist bend, presumably this should be minimized for comfort/health reasons. How would you describe the acceptable range of wrist bend?
Wrt thumb/finger alignment, as your fingers move up and down the frets for various chords (say string 1-3 vs 4-6, or even minimally between the D and A chords) does the thumb remain “anchored” on the neck or does it “float” to stay in relative alignment with the fingers? Or is there some other dynamic at play?
Is there a preferred forearm angle (wrt the floor, or maybe the neck)?
Complete beginner here, I cant feel a difference on moving my fingers from one side to the other side of the fret, whereas Justin said it felt 10 times harder, can anyone please suggest if I am doing something wrong or if this is natural
I agree a little. The difference for me was subtle.
At the fret, you just need to press hard enough to touch the fret plus a bit to keep the string there when it vibrates.
Far back from the fret, you need to press harder to avoid the buzz on the fret. I wouldn’t say it much more than 1.5x, certainly not 10x. You will also notice that picking that finger up to move it will create a momentary buzz.
This question is not about the video lesson about fingers placement but I think here would be a good thread for it.
So I have a nylon string acoustic guitar (because I don’t have the money to buy a steel string one but I have had in the past, and they are my favorite) and I’m having a little bit trouble when playing on the first 3 stings, they are slippy, I guess because they are made of plastic. Although I can play it’s not a good feeling, it makes harder to play. Also, the frets seems to be too low (its a relatively low budget guitar), so maybe that contributes to it but I don’t know.
Renan, I started out and played for several years with just a nylon string (classical) guitar. I think that I got the nut sanded down at some point to improve the action or height of the strings over the frets. If the action is too high even a nylon string guitar can be harder to play.
Justin teaches that order 1,2,3 is his preference. This applies to early beginner stuff where you are just trying to make sense of how to get your fingers moving.
All at the same time is your end goal. There will be practices later to help do this.
