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Vol. 13, No. 6: Dec.-Jan. 2008
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Your Hand Is Your Band: The Importance Of Fingering
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by Jamie Andreas
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Page added in
December, 2001
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About the Author
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Jamie Andreas is a virtuoso classical guitarist from New York.
Free! 10 Things You Can Do Right Now to Become a Better Guitarist! "The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar," the Perfect Start for Beginners, the Answer to the Problems of Players. Start to play the guitar without getting bad habits, or get rid of the bad habits you already have, by knowing how to do "perfect practice" with "The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar".
Visit www.guitarprinciples.com.
© Jamie Andreas
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Could you imagine how good a band would be if the players weren't sure
of who was supposed to play which notes? How good would their performance be
if at rehearsals different members played different notes at different times?
And yet, when guitarists practice, this is actually what happens for many
of us. Very often, we are not really sure of which fingers we are using for
each note we must play, and we do different things at different times. Or,
we may be using awkward fingering for something, because we never stopped to
think, examine, and analyze what we are doing.
As I have gone through many years of teaching the guitar, I have formed
a list which now contains many items. The list is called "really basic
things that every guitarist should fully understand and put into practice, but
apparently, nobody is telling them, or they are just not listening."
I hope eventually to get to every one of the items on this list, but
the subject of fingering is one I would like to talk about now. It often
happens that I will get a new student, who has played for a while, and had
lessons with another teacher. Many times I have been surprised, in fact,
shocked, to find them practicing things, especially rather complex things like
classical pieces or fast rock licks on electric guitar, and they do not have any fingering or picking written on the music. In other words, the notes or
tab are there, but the fingers to use for each hand are not.
Why is this important? Because the fingering is the set of instructions
that your brain is supposed to be processing and following when you play in
order to bring about the results you want: namely, the right notes at the
right time. If you have not figured out the fingering you are going to use
(or experiment with), than you are, in effect, making your practicing weak
and ineffective because you are not fulfilling the two conditions of practice:
- Know the right thing to do to achieve what you want, and
- Make sure you do it!
Here is the fundamental understanding you must have. When you are
training your fingers (and realize you are really training your whole body with
your mind) to perform the actions necessary to get the result you want (the
exact right movements at the exact right time) you must be entirely and
consciously clear as to what those movements need to be, and you must know, really
know, whether or not you are doing those movements with each repetition
during the practice process. If you have not even bothered to figure out and write
down the picking to a complex lick, or complex passage in say, a Bach fugue,
then you are undoubtedly doing something different with each repetition, and
doing something even slightly different just won't cut it when it comes to
nailing things securely.
The only time you can get away without being consciously aware of the
fingering you are using is when the notes you are playing are parts of
patterns that are already well learned, and able to be done
automatically. Of course, the more we develop as players, the more patterns we
accumulate. But if you want to continue to develop your abilities as a player, you must
know how to deal with new and challenging material, and to conquer it! And
believe me, there are ways that work, and ways that don't!
Don't be lazy. I used to want to just jump in and start playing the
music, and not have to figure out the best right hand fingering for the Bach
fugue that I couldn't wait to play. But as I developed, and saw how
unreliable and awkward the results of such practicing were, I started to take the time
to write in the fingers when I needed to. My practicing became more
consistent, and the results more powerful.
It is very important to realize that the fingering you use for a
passage can make the difference between being able to play something, and not being
able to. There are a few reasons for this:
- Some fingering is just bad. Some fingering is just awkward or
inefficient by nature for human hands.
- Some fingering may be bad for you. It may be used, and work for
someone else, because of individual anatomic differences, or different levels
of development. Fingering that wasn't good for me at one point, became
usable years later, and vice versa.
Learning the ins and outs of fingering and picking takes experience,
and analytical thinking. If you take lessons, ask your teacher about the
subject, and always think in this way when you practice.
Whenever you are having trouble with something, a lick or scale run or
intricate fingerstyle passage, ask yourself this question: do I know
every finger, on both hands, responsible for playing every note (for
pickstyle, substitute pick stroke, up or down, for the right hand). Providing an
answer to that question (the right answer, yes, of course) may very well solve
that problem for you.
Copyright 2000 by Jamie Andreas (www.guitarprinciples.com)
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Additional Columns by Jamie Andreas
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- And 22 more in the Guest Columnists series, view the index
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