By Mike Roberts
Last time we discussed posture: the art of mindful sitting, how to acquire it and how to practice it. Good posture promotes relaxation and repels tension, and today we’re going to apply those same principles to the fingerstylist’s most important and yet most troublesome tool: the right hand. (Lefties: remember this means your left hand.)
There are a huge number of elements that go into good right hand technique, and we need to get comfortable with them before we can even think about using the left hand. So let that left arm hang out, juggle, paint a portrait, whatever it does best, and get that right hand ready to roll. We’ll start with macro elements (placement and posture of hand, wrist, and fingers) and proceed to the micro elements (anatomy of a single-finger stroke).
Placement and Posture of the Right Hand
Are you sitting in your new posture, nice and relaxed? Excellent. Whether you choose to use classical or folk posture, the right hand technique will be basically the same. In fact, when it comes to the hands, classical technique is essentially the same as fingerstyle technique, and in this column I will approach them basically the same way, while pointing out some of the minor differences that occur in practice. In the real world, you’ll find a lot of variations amongst different players, especially fingerstylists, but I find there are no fundamental differences between the techniques of the two styles when they’re done right.
Views of good right hand placement and posture, viewed from the side and from the top. Refer to these as you read the following descriptions and fine-tune your own placement.
Arm Placement
Make sure your arm is resting on the edge of the guitar in such a way that your hand can hover right over the strings. The bottom of the soundhole (toward the bridge) is a good place to hover, but you can try moving a couple inches one way or the other to see what feels and sounds best to you. (Plucking closer to the bridge will give you a brighter, more trebly sound; closer to the neck will give you a mellower, more bass-heavy sound.) As mentioned last time, you’ll probably end up resting your arm just below the elbow (toward the wrist), or maybe even in the crook of the elbow, depending on the size of your guitar and your arm. (The bigger your guitar and the shorter your arm, the farther toward your elbow the ideal resting point will be.)
Wrist Position
Keep your wrist as straight as possible, and, of course, relaxed. The top of your hand should be in line and parallel with your forearm as you view it from the side—and, ideally, as you view it from the top. If you’re using folk posture, you’ll probably have to bend the wrist slightly to the side to give your hand good placement on the strings, but the side-view angle should still be completely flat. A picture is worth a thousand words here, so check the photos for reference.
Hand Placement
You’ll find that keeping your wrist straight in this way means your hand needs to hover a good 3-4 inches off the strings. This allows your fingers to extend naturally down to the strings, and creates a space under your hand that your fingers can move around in. The classic blunder here is to squash the heel of the hand down against the strings, which severely limits the motion of your fingers, and gives you bad tone to boot.
Now let’s check out the top view. Your hand should create an angle with the strings which is slightly less than perpendicular, to accommodate that straight wrist. Again, you’ll probably have to bend your wrist a little to the side in order to achieve this angle. A good rule of thumb: your knuckles should point approximately at your right leg if you’re in folk posture, at your left leg in classical posture.
Fingers
First of all, those right hand fingers need names! The classical guitar world uses the Spanish names of the fingers, and this practice has crossed over to the fingerstyle world as well. In notation, the names of the fingers are abbreviated to their first letter. They are:
p for pulgar: thumb
i for índice: index
m for medio: middle
a for añular: ring
c for chiquito: pinky (this finger is generally only used in flamenco techniques...fun name, though, huh?)
While we’re at it, let’s name the strings. They are sometimes referred to by the note the open string produces, and sometimes by number. I tend to use the note names.
High E (the skinniest string), or 1st
B, or 2nd
G, or 3rd
D, or 4th
A, or 5th
Low E, or 6th
Wondering why the string closest to the ground is called “High E?” That because “high” refers to the pitch of the string, not its physical placement. High E has the highest pitch of all the strings, Low E the lowest. Simple!
Back to placement. As mentioned, your fingers should extend loosely (i.e., relaxed) down so that your fingertips (or nails, if you have them—we’ll discuss this in more detail in a later column) can rest lightly on the strings. For now, rest your i finger (index) on the G string, m finger (middle) on the B string, a finger (ring) on the High E string. The top knuckle joint of each finger should hover over the string it’s playing. E.g., the top joint of the i finger hovers over the G string. This will give you an ideal finger angle when you pluck.
Rest your thumb (p) on the Low E string. Place the thumb in such a way that it’s closer to the neck than your fingers are. In other words, your thumb is “outside” your fingers.
Now: pluck! All four fingers at once! If your placement is correct, your index finger and thumb should glide past each other like scissors; they can touch, but they shouldn’t get in each other’s way. If they bump into each other, you need to either point your knuckles more toward the ground or extend your thumb more toward the neck, or both.
To practice what you’ve learned about right hand placement, I leave you with a simple open string pattern on an E minor chord:
Recognize it? That’s right: it’s Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters.” Who would have thought our first fingerstyle/classical musical excerpt would be a heavy metal tune? It just goes to show you: the fingerstyle universe is immense, and ever expanding.
Note on notation:
All of the exercises and excerpts we look at will be written in both standard notation (five-line staff, noteheads, stems and flags, etc.), and tablature. In tablature, also known as TAB, each line represents a string of the guitar, with the high E on top and low E on bottom. The numbers represent the frets of the guitar; 0 means you play an open string. For more information on notation, especially standard notation, I refer you to one of the many method books available for this purpose; I usually use the Hal Leonard Guitar Method for beginners. These books are cheap (7 or 8 bucks each), and learning the basics of music reading doesn’t take long as is well worth your time. Many guitarists get by with tablature alone, but for those times when TAB is nowhere to be seen, I highly recommended taking some time to learn the basic principles of standard notation.
What to Practice this week:
1) Study the photos and descriptions of right hand posture, and find a comfortable posture yourself. Make sure to give it the four-finger pluck test, and adjust as necessary.
2) Add this to your overall posture, and do more air guitar in front of the mirror, paying special attention to your right hand.
3) Practice the E minor/Metallica pattern, and make sure that good right hand posture stays true. If you’re like the vast majority of fingerstyle neophytes, you will have to make countless adjustments at first to maintain good placement. Be mindful, and do James Hetfield and Kirk Hammett proud.
4) If you don’t already know the basic principles of standard notation and/or tablature, pick up the Hal Leonard Guitar Method or a similar text and school yourself.
Next Week: The Finer Points of Plucking
See you then,
Mike
www.hotmike.com
Contact Mike: [email protected]
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