The Left Hand (or, the fretting hand, for those crazy moon-people)

Playing Technique
#1

I know Troy has mentioned people say “when are you going to do the left hand?” but don’t really have any questions.

I’m going to try a question, but it’s an extremely flat-footed and basic one.

If I’m trying to play left hand only stuff to work on hammers and pulls, how (acoustically) loud can/should I expect this to be? Say if I attempt that diminished pattern Teemu plays in his interview.

Is it a case of concentrating on blocking unwanted noise and letting the amp do the work or should I be getting levels similar to picking out of the left hand alone?

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#2

I would say that you should try to keep your legato as clean as possible and try to make the notes as loud as your picked notes, provided you’re not really smacking the strings hard when picking.

It’s hard to answer, and probably easier to demonstrate. Michael Romeo does loads of cool stuff when he is hammering on from nowhere. Unless you saw him playing it, you wouldn’t notice the difference between his picked notes and hammered notes.

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#3

While there’s something to be said for working on hammer-ons for the sake of being able to do hammer-ons, and hammer-ons require a certain amount of strength development in the left hand, I think you need to be careful that you don’t cultivate the habit of fretting harder-than-necessary all the time.

Not sure if this is controversial or not, but I think one of the keys to left hand speed and fluidity is only fretting as hard as necessary, and except in cases where you are going for an extended period with no picking or right-hand tapping, people often overestimate how hard they need to fret. Of course string height, string thickness, tuning, position along the neck, and fret geometry will all contribute to what the “minimum” fretting pressure is in a given situation, but when you’re practicing strict hammer-ons, as you’ve noticed, you’re not just applying the minimum force to fret the note, but added force/impact to get it to “ring out”.

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#4

With regards to practicing hammers on and pull offs, I saw a video from Ola Englund where he was giving some guitar tips and when is practicing legato he turns on a noise suppressor at a very high setting and tries to get the notes to sound past the heavy noise suppressor.

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#5

Hi, I have some trouble too with my left hand, and I am watching tons of videos about how the thumb should be, how the fingers should be, how to improve speed etc, what do you think about those advices?

#6

I haven’t looked closely at the rest of his videos, but the specific video you’ve linked is good advice. It’s a good rundown of what a classical guitar teacher would prescribe, with the addition of the good but non-classical advice about using the thumb to get leverage for bends.

There are some nuances he doesn’t get into in the video, like “rolling” a fingertip for string changes in certain situations, which could be perceived as violating the “use the finger tips, not the finger pads” rule, but his video is meant to cover key fundamentals, and I think it does that well.

#7

I was thinking about this just yesterday because I realised I wasn’t quite using the very very tip of my finger, especially on the 4th finger. Definitely felt an improvement with pulloffs when I concentrated on using the tip.

However I also dimly remembered a Paul Gilbert vid when he appeared to be using a lot of pad, so I hunted it out:

To me it looks like he’s extending the last joint of each finger at the point of the pulloff rather than the finger being curved over as it would be if using the very tip of the finger

And trying to do it that way (looks like sort of ‘dragging’ the pad over the string rather than trying to ‘flick’ the string with a finger tip) ALSO was an improvement for me over whatever my previous technique had been.

I have a feeling I was in a halfway house sort of position which was leading to me neither having enough pad to drag over the string nor being far enough up on the finger tip to get a good strong sound.

Edit: Just occurred to me that hand angle probably plays into which of these techniques is going to be applicable - Gilbert using the…let’s call it slanty fingered rock angle as opposed to the parallel to the frets classical angle which suits the finger tip approach.

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#8

A very important difference is that when playing classical guitar, you need to make sure that you’re not muting any strings, so that you can play multiple voices at the same time. On electric, especially with distortion, you want to mute everything but the string(s) you’re playing.

The fretting hand can play a big part in this. You can still use the fingertip, but not bend the finger so much and let it mute the other strings. I’ve had problems with the thinner strings not being muted properly, so I started doing this and it definitely helped. So this is another thing to consider when thinking about fretting technique.

Fretting_hand_mute
(an illustration from a book by Troy Stetina)

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#9

That is precisely the point I’m having trouble with. knowing when you have to play with that “slanty rock angle” and when to play with the “parrallel classical style”. If you look at Troy’s way to play, for exemple on S2Ep1 Chapter 2, DPWS, the 6 note pattern, one time he’s playing wih the first style and the other with the parallel one… I’m really getting confuse by all that and dont know to do anymore that is not “bad habbits”

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#10

Maybe this can help, never seen anyone address it in this way. I myself do a variation on this most of the time, just not so extreme on the low strings.

Don’t think this is the way to go full Holdsworth though…

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#11

Aha, thay guy destroyed everything I believed and everything the guy in my video said x)
But what he is saying seems very logical thou …

#12

Yeah, Bro. If you keep your wrist bent a lot. You can develop tendonitis or bursitis. I did when I was younger. I’d keep the wrist straight. I only mention it because this guy is almost 90 degreeing his wrist when posing. But then straightens it when he plays. That bend is kind of a bad thing to be showing people.

Cheers

#13

Yep. I’ve got quite bad tendinosis in my fretting wrist, flexor carpi ulnaris I think. Stems from when I was first learning hyperspeed picking ten years ago – it comes back every time I pick up guitar, no matter what I do. Take care of your hands, kids, you can screw them up permanently.

(Ironically, I’m a crazy moon-person who plays right-handed, meaning i’ve never had to worry much about left-hand technique – it was just overuse.)

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#14

Personally I get much better pulloffs by using a bit of pad, screw the pure fingertips approach! I noticed also Peteucci does it. It probably depends also on the size and shape of one’s fingers.

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#15

There’s a fundamental rule that pretty much all bass players are acutely aware of, but many guitarists are not: fret as close as possible to the fret whenever you possibly can. If you don’t do this on guitar, you don’t pay for it most of the time, but if you don’t do it on bass and your action is the least bit on the low side, you’re more likely to get buzz. On guitar, this is primarily important for legato/tapping, but if you have .8 mm action, the situation is similar to bass

Fretting right next to the fret seems obvious, I know, but I played a very long time with my fingers not as close to the frets as possible. I see a lot of great YouTube players fretting dead center between frets even when not performing herculean stretches…

No one has mentioned that guitar specs also matter. It helps to have tall frets with legato/tapping because any pressure exerted upon the fingerboard itself is pressure not going into the string. More power is required for higher action or greater string tension, so you can offset the lack of serious fretwire by using lighter strings.

There’s a guy named Martin Goulding (Linear Sphere) who does a good job of filling the fretting hand instructional void. His picking technique is ridiculously clean and efficient, but when teaching he speaks a lot about the left hand. I recommend his advice and exercises here. He also has a lot of great YouTube videos–mostly etudes which make use of virtually every technique there is. For anyone who delights in the aesthetics of playing guitar, his hands are a joy to watch. He addresses things like finger angle, thumb position, transitioning the thumb depending on what strings one is playing on and if vibrato is required, as well as making use of redundant left-hand muting. Also a big fan of hammer-ons out of nowhere.

Here’s a legato lesson from him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CMnKg2-Mjdk

He offers Skype lessons, and while I’ve never studied with him, I imagine a single hour would help even a lot of advanced players.

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#16

Keep your wrist straight and try bromelain supplement. It’s a natural enzyme from Pineapple. It helps repair muscle injury inflammation. This is what made the bursitis knot in my wrist go away when I was about 16yo. Bromelain, and losing the 90-degree wrist angle. (wrist straight)

-Hankwie Poohsteen :bear: