Left hand fingers are weak - looking for advice

Playing Technique
#1

Hi all,

I think the title is simple and self explanatory.

My left hand fingers just feel too weak. They tremble, they land on the wrong notes, land on the wrong string sometimes. I don’t feel in control of my guitar’s neck. Even when jamming with friends, I am always the first to switch to open chords because my left hand can’t handle the pain. I lift weights and go climbing regularly. So I don’t consider my hands or forearms weak in general.

I have used some left hand exercising devices, designed a lot of legato exercises to focus on my weaknesses. Designed a lot of alternate picking exercises to focus on the passages that confuse my brain, especially third and fourth fingers where I tend to use the wrong one. I did a lot of metronome work where I practice at the speed where I can still barely play the notes correctly. There is a lot of progress on the right hand side, especially thanks to CtC. But for the left hand, there is very slow progress or almost no progress at all. Even if there is any, it’s gone the next day.

I started playing the guitar 17 years ago. But I only took practice seriously during the first two years. After that, I barely played. I started playing again three years ago with daily practice. I even bought myself a traveler guitar so that I won’t quit practicing while traveling. And my practice intensified after discovering CtC two years ago. If I could quantify my practice time, that would be at least one hour a day, everyday for the last three years.

I still believe that the average player should be able to play 16th notes at 160 bpm without issues with the necessary amount and type of practice. So there must be something wrong I am doing.

Here is my picking thread if you spot something wrong with my left hand:

I am not tempted to do the whole practice for 8 hours a day for a month or two thing because I believe that if I am practicing the wrong way, that would simply lead me to nothing. Except maybe injury.

Any advice? It’s getting a bit frustrating. The kind of frustration that leads you to bending your strings to break them. So it’s getting a bit serious :sweat_smile:

Cheers \m/

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#2

Could you describe your exercises, and possibly just as importantly, how you practise them?

You might get better results practising at a speed where you can’t possibly go wrong. However painfully slow that might be.

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#3

@kounistou I think this is more mental than physical. I don’t think fast and accurate fingers come from muscle strength. What I would suggest is training your left hand fingers so you don’t have to think about them at all. Years ago, a simple thing that worked for me and helped tremendously was the permutations of four fingers thing that so many people do.

1234 2134 3124 4123
1243 2143 3142 4132
1324 2314 3214 4213
1342 2341 3241 4231
1423 2413 3412 4312
1432 2431 3421 4321

(where numbers are fingers)

I would start in a position somewhere in the middle of the neck and go slowly at first, trying to stay relaxed while playing each permuation on every string. Consider playing with all downstrokes or all upstrokes. No need to go fast here. Be sure to mix up which permutation you might start with on a given day or practice session, always starting with 1234 isn’t going to get you far, especially if you make it only 6 permutations in before needing a break of whatever. At some point you can speed these up, but for now I’d focus on making the mental connection of four-finger sets with precision and a good sound.

Good luck!

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#4

Hi,

@blueshinstuschen thanks a lot! I will experiment with these for a few weeks and see where this takes me. After a couple of hours of practice, I understood more your statement:

Indeed, I tend to always go back to start from this because it feels easier and more familiar. So What I started doing now is starting with column 2 then 3 then 4 and 1. Then 3, 4, 1 and 2. Then approach them row by row. There are so many possibilities actually.

I wouldn’t rush to report any results but this is definitely challenging. Not from a mechanical point of view, but from a mental point of view. Which is why I am optimistic about it. Hopefully this will help me “decouple” my fretting hand’s fingers.

@Prlgmnr I will post some of those exercises here later on.
About speed. Understood!

Thanks!

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#5

Yeah man! Looking forward to hearing how it works out in a month or so from now, happy shedding!

#6

For left hand, practice in the dark.

Visual control and kinesthetic control are completely separate. If you’re looking at your hand you are retarding your left hand development.

Just feel the neck, the strings. Don’t try to imagine them in your mind or construct a map in your mind, just feel it, over time your brain will adapt.

Visual imagination and tactual navigation are two different things.
Apparently people blind from birth can not comprehend 3d objects in their mind, this is direct evidence mental maps and tactical navigation are two separate things.

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#7

If you’re getting pain every time you play I’d think about maybe getting a professional to look at that as it can’t be good.

Doing stuff like rock climbing I’d imagine that you’re used to having to exert a lot of pressure gripping with your fingers, are you maybe carrying that over to the guitar? I find too much fretting pressure makes it more likely I make mistakes playing at speed, also not easy to stop sometimes as when making position shifts I’ve noticed I tend to apply more pressure to the back of the neck. I find playing with a relaxed left hand really helps a lot.

Anyway, hope you get it sorted.

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#8

That kind of pain shows up only after a couple of hours of playing or so. And mainly on my acoustic guitar. So maybe some other elements like string gauge, action and playing a lot of barred chords come into play. So I am not too worried about that part at the moment.

I have a friend who plays the violin semi-professionally who claims that climbing is negatively affecting her playing style and she stopped doing it. She mentioned that she feels the difference when practicing the day after. She said that she wants to keep her fingers relaxed and climbing is teaching her the opposite. So I wonder if there is truth in that. That also makes me remember how Marty Friedmann hates shaking hands because he thinks that some guys squeeze his hand too hard :smile:

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#9

I certainly FEEL like lifting weights/swinging kettlebells/playing the drums affects my guitar playing, but I’m not convinced it actually does in any direct way. As in, if my forearms are fatigued it can put me in the mindset that I won’t be able to play as well but I think it’s more mental than an actual physical barrier.

Climbing of course could be different because you can be delivering a lot of force right through the tips of your fingers.

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#10

A lot of great guitar players are hardly what you’d call muscular. Exercise is always a good thing… except when it isn’t. If you approach the guitar with tension in your body to begin with then it’s very easy to over ‘press’ with your left hand and use way more force than necessary. I had problems with my left hand cramping for a good while and I eventually cured it by switching to a really light gauge string and using a scalloped neck which forced me to play with a much lighter touch for good intonation. Bit of an extreme fix but it worked…

I think the whole ‘SRV played with 13’s man, don’t use those girly strings’ attitude has caused more guitarists physical problems than perhaps any other factor. That may not be the case for you but I think it’s definitely worth considering. It’s kind of a joke really to think that one gauge of strings is more ‘manly’ than another but many people fall into that trap (I did myself for a long time). As BB King said to Billy Gibbons about his heavy strings ‘why you working so hard?’… Billy now uses 7’s and 8s and has a massive tone… as do Yngwie, Brian May and others…

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#11

This was the first thing I thought of when you mentioned SRV at the top of the paragraph! :smiley:

Wish I had known that one to rebut some of the guitar “bros” I used to shoot the shit with.

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#12

Just in case someone thinks I’m making it up… here’s the man himself saying it, starts about 3 min in.

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#13

I tried this for 20 minutes last night, and was really surprised with what I found. I’m working on descending notes on each string - right now my fingers can’t quite keep up. I was doing straightforward 4321 fingering, across all the strings, then down a fret, working my way down the fretboard. If I looked at my left hand as I played, no problem.

But as soon as I closed my eyes, I’d find I was doing 4211 - and I’d only realise I was even making a mistake because I heard the index finger (1) note twice! I found myself consistently doing that on almost every string if I didn’t focus on the 3rd finger. It’s like my brain totally overlooks it if I let it. So there’s definitely some learning for my brain to do there, which is bound to improve my descending notes. I’ll continue with this practise technique. Thanks a lot, @WhammyStarScream!

My experience with climbing has been that it would often leave me with a feeling in my fingers that was kind of a mixture of numbness and weakness, and I’d feel kind of clumsy with them for a while afterwards. I’d also feel a lot of soreness and tension in my forearms. I attributed this to the large amounts of pressure and tension exerted on the fingers, and I wasn’t that comfortable with how that might affect my fingers, wrists and arms in the long term.

So generally I don’t really climb anymore. I decided I’d much rather make the choice to avoid rock climbing and continue with guitar and computer programming (something else I enjoy, and my main source of income), than end up in a situation where I couldn’t comfortably play guitar or write code and might find myself forced to give them up.

That’s just me though. I wasn’t super into climbing, whereas I’m passionate about playing music and writing code, so it was a pretty easy (if maybe overly cautious) decision to make.

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