Todays lesson is this.

A picture is worth a thousand words. (NB - One justified criticism of the way Tarrega holds the guitar is that his right shoulder is a little to high, a sign of excess tension.)

One of the problems I see most often among guitar players is playing on the wrong part of the finger. This often leads to other problems such as bumping neighbor strings. The solution is to play on the fingertip about 1/2 cm or so from the fingernail. Also, for some fingers the location is slightly off to the side rather than smack in the middle of the finger. For the first finger on the left hand side the string should come in contact with the finger on the left side of the finger tip (left as you look at your finger, closer to the thumb rather than the middle finger) The second and third fingers tend to be more or less in th middle. And then comes the fourth finger on the left hand (the problem-child). For the fourth finger you should play on the right hand side of the fingertip. This causes the fourth finger to point in back towards the thumb. I drew a picture that probably does a better job of showing this. Click on it to zoom in.

Playing guitar correctly involves using the weight of the left arm not just the strength of the left-hand fingers. This is difficult to achieve. Some feel as if their hand is frozen when they try to do this. For this I would suggest that your arm’s weight needs to be held up between notes, or in other words only use your arm’s weight when a note is making sound. Two suggestions on how to try this.
1) Practice playing with your left hand thumb not touching the guitar neck at all. You will feel the guitar wanting to fly out and your right hand forearm keeping it in place. I wouldn’t suggest doing this all the time, but it is a good way to develop the feel.
2) Play things slowly. Feel your arms weight being used while a note is sounding, and feel it being relieved when the note is complete. I like to picture a faucet being turned on or off. Make it clearly on or off, no drips.

Often the question comes up what a left handed person should do when learning the guitar. Should they string their guitar upside down ala Jimi Hendrix? In a word, no. First of all the most difficult part of learning the guitar is in the left-hand (the fretting hand) so that puts you lefties at an advantage. Secondly a lot of guitars are built with right handers in mind. If you were to look underneath the soundboard of a quality nylon string guitar you would see that the supports are asymmetrical, in other words they build it to support the varying weight of the bass versus the treble strings. So if you string you guitar upside down it won’t sound as good. There are some “lefty” guitars in production but they can be hard to find, and the selection isn’t as good.

The role of the left hand thumb is one of the most important and least talked about elements of guitar technique. What is the left hand thumb’s job? Well let’s start with what it is not supposed to do (brace yourself):

1. It is not a flag. If you look over at your left hand while playing and it is waving around saying hello to the world, it is in the wrong place. I don’t care if Eric Clapton does it, it’s wrong. He is primarily an electric guitar player which has a smaller neck anyhow. Hey don’t kill the messenger here, I’m not making this stuff up. It’s tradition.

2. It is not a finger. Okay, well, yes it is. But, don’t use it like you use your left hand fingers. It should not push a string down onto the fretboard that is not its job. When I see people play a “D” chord and hold down the F# in the bass I get sick. As my Italian teacher says “Brutto, brutto.” (more…)