The guitar doesn't fit - issues with size and position

Technique Critique
#16

Hey man, not to sound like a broken record, but check this video of Marty playing the Tornado solo:

Your left hand placement isn’t far off from where his is. For the bigger arpeggios, notice he only pulls his thumb round back slightly, just enough to open his hand more to reach the notes, then he’s back to neutral. That high up on the neck I really wouldn’t recommend trying to plant your thumb like you’re about to do a barre chord. Angling your fingers towards the frets slightly will also help create a wider reach without feeling the need to “stretch out”

I hope that helps!

#17

Thanks for posting this clip. Couple minor things. I moved this into “Technique Critique”, which is where we put all threads about people looking for feedback on what they’re doing. It’s easier to find that way. And also, we’ll know to look there to make sure all the requests are being answered.

Also, when you post YT links, the best way is to just paste the “youtube.com” link in the main post body, without using the link button. The forum will automatically embed that video so it’s playable right here in the thread. I edited that so it should be visible.

Re: hand / wrist placement, what @BlackInMind is saying is completely on point. When you wear your guitar “rock ‘n’ roll” low and put your thumb in the middle of the neck, you have to flex the wrist to the limit. Here’s the difference between wrist flexion, extension, and deviation:

A highly flexed wrist can be uncomfortable in the short term and cause injury over the long haul. If you put your thumb over the neck it’s much more comfortable because the wrist isn’t flexed as much. And you will see lots of elite players doing this. For certain phrases, it gives you even more reach than the thumb behind the neck. But certain other phrases might not be as reachable. And again, as @BlackInMind is saying, there are variables relating to your hand size and some experimentation is necessary.

The classical players are the only ones who really solve this problem in a standardized way. They wear the guitar high, with a high neck angle. This lets them do the big stretches with the straightest possible wrist. They have to. They wouldn’t last a week with a low slung guitar.

High strap height guitar. Works for Tom Morello, it can work for you.

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#18

Again, If I raise the guitar strap, it starts to hurt my R shoulder, just like when I play seated.

The classical players are the only ones who really solve this problem in a standardized way. They wear the guitar high, with a high neck angle.

Classical players also have a thick classical guitar body that puts the guitar out in front by at least three inches or more. That means the neck is less likely to be smashed against the palm. Why? Because the guitar neck is further out away from the player’s body, thusly creating more space for the throw of the forearm, leaving more room for the hand to be there, not smashed short. Even if you have the dual problems of very broad shoulders and a very flat breastplate, like I do, classical guitar puts the guitar in a good position for playing.

Classical players also don’t normally wear the guitar as they tend to use a foot rest for the lead leg, upon which the guitar body rests.

Classical players seldom play high positions.

Again, my LH problem — hand smashed, bad angle, is in the high positions where the palm is smashed flat against the back of the neck. This is where hand tends to rotate inward, or pronate, where, due to humeral angle, you can’t get the same angle on the neck by forearm supination. If you cannot easily supinate to have the palm face up, there will be difficulty to play 3 note per string scales there. Apparently most people don’t have problems turning their hands to face the sky. For me, that is very hard and also hurts a little (see photo where I strain with about 75% full power to nearly do so).

Where I am trying to supinate the forearm in the high positions, I am very tense. Where I am trying to create space by pulling my shoulder back, by arching my back, by trying to get that guitar out front, I am tense. Too much tension hurts my body and my playing.

It would be easier if the guitar neck were sideways-shifted towards the fretting hand and angled up.

I am NOT saying the thumb needs to be behind the neck ALL THE TIME. But when the palm it is smashed flat; when the wrist is cranked, playing is hard. So how do you make it not smashed flat…………

What I did on that purple guitar was to change the strap buttons. The UPPER button is BEHIND the horn, while the LOWER button is on the top side of the face of the guitar body (fugly but functional). That helps a good bit. By putting the strap button behind the horn, the guitar upper horn (and the guitar neck, by connection), the guitar can travel outwards, away from the player’s body.

You can also see in that Joey Tafolla video how he is using his R forearm to push the guitar body in, thereby making the neck pop outwards more. Yet with that, you can see that the strap button on the upper horn is pulling the guitar back in towards his body. Joey is using his muscle to fight against not only gravity, but also the strap tension.

@BlackInMind is trying to help and posted an awesome video. But my problem is perhaps a bit different and hard to understand.

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#19

I tend to agree with @BlackInMind here, but I think it needs more explanation.

What you describe with your left hand sounds very familiar to me. The supination required for classical position on high frets is too uncomfortable to be usable. The left hand wants to be more neutral, which requires, as you say, the guitar neck to be angled upward. But to angle the neck upward, you have to push on it somehow. Classical position does not allow for the left hand to support weight. The guitar must sit in a stable position on its own, without any help from the left hand.

I also don’t like very high slung guitars. Though they do give you a more neutral left elbow, they don’t really solve the supination problem, and I don’t like what they do to my right shoulder. My right hand wants the guitar lower.

So blues position seems to be necessary, because it allows you to rest the guitar on your palm, which means you can push the neck forward and tilt it upward, and put your arm and hand in a comfortable position. But now your fingers are too far away from the fretboard.

Which is what I assume motivates this:

The way I solved the problem was exactly this. I modified my blues position so that the neck doesn’t contact my palm. Instead, it bridges between the inside of my index knuckle and my outermost thumb joint. There’s about 1 cm between the back of the neck and the closest part of my palm. Only the tip of my thumb wraps around the neck. Not enough to fret notes with.

The guitar neck rests there very comfortably, almost like it was made to fit. So this bridge very quickly converts to a grip. I can easily hang the guitar vertically by the neck, by squeezing my thumb toward the base of my index finger. I play single notes in this position about 80% of the time now, only occasionally switching to classical position when I need to reach toward the bass strings or play barre chords. For most other chord shapes, I keep the grip described above.

This grip gives me the benefits of the blues position: I can physically move the neck around and angle it upward for reaching high up the neck. But I can also fully extend my wrist and simply push the neck forward. And my left hand is neutral, not supinated. My fingers are not parallel to the frets, like in classical position. I can bend and vibrato by rotating my left forearm, just like in blues position.

Plus, it has the added benefit of acting like an anchor. Just like my right hand, my left hand benefits from a constant point of contact on the guitar. It allows for more accuracy because there’s less guessing how much the neck has moved in the few milliseconds since the last time I touched it.

Now that I’m familiar with it, I now see this approach as a sort of hybrid classical/blues grip, as it gives the benefits of each without the drawbacks. I also notice it everywhere. Like @BlackInMind, when I examine the left hands of most high-level guitarists, I usually see them using the same grip. If there is any left hand code to crack, I consider this grip to be one of the central concepts, because it solves exactly the problems you describe. It made a huge difference in my playing and my comfort.

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#20

Interesting posts here… I practice sitting down with a footrest on my left foot and have the strap set so that when I stand up it is in a similar position.

When I have tough stretches to make for the left hand high on he neck (EVH sort of stuff) and need that extra access, l kind of stoop down to let the bottom corner (where the input jack is) lay sort of in my right groin. This gives me two benefits, 1- the weight of the guitar is taken largely by my leg, 2- I can angle the guitar neck up and out to give my fretting hand to assume the position needed to access the frets whilst not heavily supinating the arm and only a small bend in the wrist.

In this video, Paul Gilbert does somewhat of a similar thing at 3:41, but puts it on the left leg for an extreme neck angle and height. When I do my thing it is quite quick to pop it into position for a lick and then stand up to resume the normal position.

Experiment!

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#21

Funny you should mention ‘the lean’. I’ve posted about that strategy before as well. I was going to bring it up again here, but I thought my post was already too long.

I agree with what you say, though, and I think it could be useful to @GTR. It’s a very good solution when you really need classical position, especially high on the neck, though it works lower on the neck as well. Switching to ‘the grip’ made it necessary to do this less often, but it’s still very useful. To me, a left-hand CTC would include both the grip and the lean.

#22

Awesome, I’m gonna give that a look!

Yeah , the ‘lean’, sounds a lot better than my “shove your guitar into your groin” method, lol. Maybe I love my guitar a bit too much!

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#23

Instead of pushing the guitar out with your LH, which won’t be afford LH stability, push on the guitar body with your right forearm, like Joey Tafolla does. This causes the guitar neck to angle out. The guitar angle’s vertex is still the base of the guitar. This means the lower frets, which do NOT need more space, get waaay more space while the upper frets get only a couple of stingy centimeters.

|    ∕
|   ∕
|  ∕
| ∕👌     
|∕  <----------- R arm; base of guitar body.

The disadvantage is the R arm is tense, holding the guitar. Feels like not free rhythm and timing. Playing and phrasing don’t breathe and pop with life, but is instead hold tense.

Instead, the guitar body should be out away from the players body, like an acoustic, to put the upper frets out in front more. The guitar neck should also have a slight pitch so that the lower frets are closer. Then if you could have a lower horn to also use for the leg, that would be cool, too.

I’m gonna start a “Make this fugly guitar less fugly” threat and post my pig butt design.

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#24

Link: Guitar Design Assthetic…

#25

I argree that pushing with the right hand/arm will make the picking hand tense, thats why I do the leg/groin lean - you don’t need to touch the guitar with the right hand and it will stay (relatively) still.

#26

Sorry to disagree. The grip I described gives me the most stable left hand I’ve ever had. Like I said, I consider this problem solved.

This exactly why I don’t consider this an acceptable solution. It doesn’t sound like you do either.

Best of luck with your design.

#27

I would argue that there isn’t anything inherently “wrong” about a standard electric guitar design, although certain body styles do influence certain habits. I’ve discovered that when I’m doing scalar picking I’m a wrist deviator ala Eric Johnson, so playing my rhythm guitarists’ Xiphos was awkward as hell since there isn’t a nice place to support the forearm, you pretty much have to be a rotational picker on pointy guitars.

That being said, I can’t see making an electric guitar “fatter” making things any more or less easier to play.

There is a physical reason that the “lean” makes things easier to reach… you are spreading apart the shoulder blades and getting more of the upper torso and arm around the perimeter of the guitar. I see this in young guitar students who most likely have really strict parents always yelling at them to sit up straight. Their shoulder blade movement is severely restricted and they have trouble reaching around the neck of the guitar.

Theoretically, a fatter, more acoustic guitar design could force a player to do this, but I suspect if a guitarist isn’t inclined to naturally go to this movement that they would probably feel even more restriction on a fatter body than on a slimmer one.

Also, with @GTR continually referencing Joey Tafolla… perhaps he does the movements you are describing, and I’m sure he’s a fantastic player, but for one player’s example I can find ten or twenty that do something different and are highly skilled and effortless musicians. I would suggest a smarter thing to do would be to find a consistency that all or most players do and find out what that is and use that as what you’re looking for. And I can assure you, most all players will do some form of the “lean” to get those shoulder blades moving at some point or another, and depending on their body size it can be more subtle, or more pronounced (like in Gilbert’s case).

#28

Ben Eller roars through this solo with his usual calm and unhindered way. His thumb routinely pokes over above about the 10th fret. See if there is anything here that will help.

I also believe you’re wearing the guitar roughly 2 inches too low.

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#29

Correct me if I’m wrong, this was the issue you had 4-5 years ago on artistworks (before what appears to be your recent ban), and seemed to have been resolved since.

#30

not really sure why you refer to me in third person. E.g.
“Also, with @BlackInMind being unfamiliar with guitarists pressing the forearm against the armrest portion of the guitar body to stabilize its angle, I was able to find another example https://youtu.be/s6OowWer7t4?t=120 “ weird to do it that way.

That’s a really strange problem. I’ve never heard of somebody who is not able to reach around the guitar. Most likely you’ve misunderstood that person‘s problem, too.

My problem is… Well, I’ve restaed the problem with pictures and everything… But let’s say I rotate the scapula to extend the shoulder forward more. That’s going to make my arm reach longer. If you read back to the first thread, you can see I have not enough space for my arm and that causes my forearm to be smashed flat against the back of the neck. So that’s obviously going to be the opposite of what I want to do. I need to retract the shoulders to get more space, like Billy Sheehan does.

#31

This thread title is distinctly not “my issue resolved [EOM]“. You didn’t know that? Or did you just want to bring up that I was banned from artistworks? Just trying to cut of the noise to see if there’s any signal here……

#32

Are you pushing the guitar neck away from your body with your fret hand thumb fully behind the neck, or with the thumb slightly peeking out?

I’m not sure why this is so hard for me. It’s really frustrating! Maybe I need a thicker neck to play this way?

#33

I’m wearing the guitar 2 inches too low?

If raise the guitar strap, it starts to hurt my R shoulder, just like when I play seated.

#34

If a 2 inch change in how high your guitar sits on your body causes pain, is there an injury you sustained at some point you haven’t mentioned?

The reality is that there is no magic guitar design, neck thickness, thumb placement, wrist position etc. that will get you there. At some point you either give up or figure it out. Cracking the Code and Troy’s discoveries prove that. Nowhere does his research indicate that guitar design is a problem. I don’t know that he ever so much as mentions it.

Django Reinhardt is a prime example of one who figured it out. His left hand was severely damaged in a fire. Only two fingers were actually usable. For a Gypsy Jazz player, that should have been the end. Yet, he figured out how to play what he wanted with only two fingers available. At a velocity most can’t achieve with all four fingers and the internet.

#35

not really sure why you refer to me in third person. E.g.
“Also, with @BlackInMind being unfamiliar with guitarists pressing the forearm against the armrest portion of the guitar body to stabilize its angle, I was able to find another example Alex Skolnick guitar solo tribute to Malcolm Young -Testament - Brno 2017 - YouTube “ weird to do it that way.

I’m typing in a way that addresses everyone reading the thread.

That’s a really strange problem. I’ve never heard of somebody who is not able to reach around the guitar. Most likely you’ve misunderstood that person‘s problem, too.

And from watching Troy’s material, we know that most everyone is physically capable of performing all the different types of movements required to be a virtuoso guitarist. That does not mean everyone has great kinesthetic, or bodily, awareness to know to make the correct movements at the correct times, or even how to apply different movements to different situations. If that were true, We would all be kinesthetic geniuses that naturally find the proper way to move on their instrument, you wouldn’t have an issue, and Troy would be out of a job :smile:

My problem is… Well, I’ve restaed the problem with pictures and everything… But let’s say I rotate the scapula to extend the shoulder forward more. That’s going to make my arm reach longer. If you read back to the first thread, you can see I have not enough space for my arm and that causes my forearm to be smashed flat against the back of the neck. So that’s obviously going to be the opposite of what I want to do. I need to retract the shoulders to get more space, like Billy Sheehan does.

Coming from someone who studied body mapping as applied to the guitar (similar to Alexander Technique) I can assure you the last thing you want to be doing, and I don’t know where you heard or saw Billy Sheehan say to do this. I had this exact line of thinking for years and it messed up my left hand for a long time.

At this point I think what you need is an in person or skype guitar lesson one on one with a teacher that can help you in real time. I honestly don’t feel like the conversation is making any progress here, since you seem to be shooting down everyone’s advice and seem to have already made up your mind as to what you need to be doing. Good luck!

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