I’ve always played with one finger per fret. In watching ascending and descending fives I noticed Troy uses his middle and ring fingers and hardly any pinky at all.
If I were to adopt this method it would take some time to unlearn using my pinky but I can already tell that there is some more strength that comes with this technique.
If using one finger per fret I noticed I have to roll my ring finger on the way up and down to hit the note directly above/below it. However, using one finger per fret I think is more technically correct and may offer me more options.
Is there a best practice or common suggestion for which method do adopt?
More “technically correct” according to who, or by what metric? The best pentatonic players don’t follow the one finger per fret strategy, and for good reasons.
I’m writing up a (very long) post about Eric Johnson’s fretting mechanics which will outline how he uses finger rolls in his sequences. I’ll include some comparison to Shawn Lane’s mechanics and sequences for contrast. Hopefully, that post will be finished this week.
Watching Michael Schenker absolutely fly around the fretboard using this 2 1 3 fingering for his pentatonic lines sold me on this approach. I can’t imagine anyone doing this with just fingers 1 and 3 or1 and 4
Shawn Lane’s approach to pentatonics has a lot in common with Michael Schenker’s style, lots of (1 2 3) combinations, but Shawn used a lot of (1 2 4) aswell.
On the other hand, Eric Johnson’s approach is primarly based on (1 3) combinations with a lot of rolling.
I’m a chronic finger roller, mostly by necessity because I’m missing a 1/2” off the tip of my middle finger. I can’t bend up with it at all but I can bend down. There not much of a tip either because the remaining nail kinda bends over the it so it slips off the string, so it’s slightly bent in as opposed to being bent out. Some chords are insanely difficult to play, and the standard 3NPS scales I do with 1, 3, 4 unless it’s a 1/2 step from the first finger.
I do it pretty much as often as possible out of habit. It’s evolved into where I’ll roll any finger across any number of strings. Since we’re talking EJ, here’s what I do for this lick early on in the Desert Rose solo.
I roll the pinky on the last 2 notes of the first group of 4, then roll the pointer on the first and last notes of the 2nd and 3rd groups and the ring finger on the middle 2 notes of those. The fifth group is also rolled for all 4 notes. This is my own tabbed version using the high E-string more often since I have trouble stretching to the same notes on the B-string. I don’t bar the pointer either. If it’s just the A-string and the E-string, all of the notes in between are muted,
I am incredibly eager to read this! I don’t attempt EJ’s style of fingering since I have small hands but one thing I’ve noticed that helps me a lot is to completely lift my finger off a played note instead of “resting” it on the string, for lack of a better word. It’s the easiest way for me to play his fastest lines clean. I’d like to do it more often, but a couple of decades of not doing that are hard to unlearn lol
I’m now at a whopping 30 pages in Word, over 10,000 words with tabbed examples. I still haven’t covered his diatonic shapes or his use of spread triads, but it’s mostly done.
I’ve been experimenting with all these different fingerings for ascending and descending in this pattern. Also, 12th fret box position vs. 5th fret requires less stretching.
Does it really matter or should I just try them all and see what I can do fastest and then lean into that one? even if I finger it differently at the 12th vs 5th fret
I aim for comfort before speed and hope that the two eventually meet. I’ve never tried the non-rolling way, but that clip of Schenker makes one hell of a case for it. I wouldn’t be able to do it on the higher strings but I probably could with the lower 3.
It’s taking a while to really percolate in, but some of your past observations on fretting hand technique and some of the things we’ve discussed in the past are really starting to come together for me, and my fretting hand is starting to feel a lot more fluid than it used to. It’s a cool feeling, thanks again!
Also, something we should all consider. Sending Tom a few euros if he’s helped your playing in some way. He’s got paypal info in his article. I’ve done this several times over the years. He provides all this knowledge so freely to us and it’s really game changer stuff that I don’t think we could get anywhere else. The professional fretting monsters (Holdsworth, Graham, Harrison, Garsed etc) all have instructional material and as far as I’m aware, none of them go into a fraction of the details Tom does on the mechanics of fretting. Like most guitar instruction, they all show “what” they do without any mention of the “how”. Tom’s really the CtC of the fretting hand.
This article has been in the works for quite a while. I had some earlier drafts written from about 18 months ago. The content was largely decided upon, and material covered has been known to me for a long time. Most of the supplemental files had alread been produced. It was mostly a matter of writing it up and formatting the document, but yes, it took a lot of work over the past week to get this finished.
That’s fantastic to hear. I’m a long way past proof of concept with all of this in my own playing now.
This is very much appreciated.
If this information was available from other sources, I’d cite them instead and save myself a lot of work. I think the body of knowledge that I’m building is largely unprecedented.
I’ve always been generous with my knowledge and my time. Some people tell me I’m too generous.
This really is high praise. CTC set a new standard for technical guitar instruction, and it inspired me to start getting my work out. I think it’s also a just a matter of time until CTC is the CTC for the fretting hand, too.
Yeah, I mean, as you said elsewhere, it can take a long time to change muscular habits that have been baked in for 2-3 decades… but I guess for perspective there’s been a couple times in the last week where I’ve been working on a solo I’ve written for one of my pieces, will be jamming along with it, and think, “hmm, that feels a little awkward… oh, right, my wrist isn’t fully relaxed and in the right orientation, lets play that again… ahh there we go.”
I’ll get there. I just sometimes need a few reminders. I’m really stoked with the music I’ve been writing though so this has been an exciting project, and again I think it’s hilarious that the first time I saw you posting about optimizing fretting hand technique my first reaction was “this dude’s crazy, of course your hand just figures it out on your own.” All I’ll say in my defense is you won me over pretty quickly when you started talking about the physiology of the fretting hand.
If you ever come through Boston, I owe you a beer.
