Years ago, well before I considered playing the guitar, I broke the third finger on my right hand. I’m a left handed player, so that’s my fretting hand. The finger now doesn’t flex inward at the distal knuckle as much as it once did, but that’s not the biggest issue. When the finger healed after the break it adopted a bit of a angle toward the second finger. So now when I position my fingers over the neck to chord, the third finger tends to slide away from the fret in the direction of the nut.
I’ve been playing for a little over a year, so pretty much still at the start of my journey, but this issue is slowing me down. I’ve discovered that positioning my thumb behind my second finger seeems to help, as well as moving the guitar neck vertically. Besides those mechanics I’m wondering if there are any useful stretches to help me train the finger to stay put. I’m doing Spiders routinely in my warm-ups, hoping that will help over time, but any other ideas, as well as additional hints, would be appreciated.
I have very similar issues, whereby my finger has an angle towards the fourth finger. At the beginning of my learning I opened the following thread and got some encouragement of the community:
More than a year later I can say, that my fingers give me some extra work, because I really have to work hard to get them in the right positions. There are many situations where I have to improvise a little bit. But I can also say, that it got slightly better with steady practice, as if I did some “ergotherapy”. I did a lot of finger stretching exercise, walking up and down the strings with fingers in different order to train independent finger movement and a lot of scale playing. I always pay attention to place fingers as good as I can. Had a lot of distress with the Big G, as pinky and third finger get in the way of each other, also with Dm because of the stretch. I haven’t found a 100% solution to solve the problem, but so far, I could deal with it. Hope you can figure out what helps you!
Thanks, Helen. Positive thoughts are most welcome. I’m hopeful that continued stretching and regular practice will improve my finger placement. The first step in overcoming a problem is knowing you’ve got one.