How To Fix Your DEATH GRIP On The Guitar Neck
How much force do you think it takes to hold down a note on the guitar?
Sounds like a simple question, but think about it... Take a flimsy piece of wire, add tension to it, push it down a quarter of an inch... How much pressure does that take?
Probably not very much, right?
Then why does almost every guitar player use way too much force to hold the strings down?
Even the ones that don’t probably did at some point, what gives?
(You can't put that much pressure on your guitar neck! How is the guitar supposed to breathe?)
The simple answer is that even though holding down a guitar string takes very little force, the muscles and techniques that are used to hold them down are undeveloped when you first start playing.
At the beginning, holding down a single note, or god forbid a chord might feel extremely difficult, but in time it gets much easier.
Here’s the thing though. Since these things were hard to play at the beginning most guitar players made it a habit to use too much force when they hold the strings down!
And since it's a habit... they keep doing that until someone tells them they don’t need to.
If you have this problem... stop! You don’t have to push that hard!
If you find that you’ve been doing this for so long that you can’t ‘just stop’, then go at the link below and I’ll show you, step by step, exactly what you need to do to erase this habit completely.
Now that you can play for hours and hours without ever getting tired, you'll probably need some new chords to play so you wont get bored. Check out my Complete Chord Mastery guitar course to give yourself a complete understanding of chords and harmony on the guitar.
Video Transcription
Hello, Internet! So nice to see you. I got a question on how to avoid the death grip on your fretting hand when you are playing. The only thing I want to bring up is, I wish I'd been started on electric guitar first.
Unfortunately, I started on my grandmother's 1952 Gibson acoustic, and I learned a bad habit of gripping the fretboard too hard when I switched to electric. I would cause my hand to hurt and get tight because of the bad habit I learned from playing an acoustic.
You know, I started on acoustic guitar too, and I had the exact same problem. And by the way, that doesn't mean that acoustic guitars are bad, it's just that when I started, what I had was a pretty bad acoustic guitar, and so I had to squeeze the strings, to squeeze the life out of the strings to get a sound out of them.
Of course, the moment you get an electric or a better set up acoustic guitar, all this strength is not necessary anymore. More than that, but when you are starting, you have no calluses on your fingers, so you have to squeeze a lot, but after a month or two you are playing, you get calluses on your fingers.
The calluses are harder than the normal flesh, so you just need less strength to play. I'm saying all this immediately, because if you are just getting started with the guitar, you shouldn't worry. Okay, it's gonna get easier.
But, if you already started, and you got the bad habit, and by the way, everybody get this bad habit for the reason I just said, because at the beginning you have to press more, because they don't have calluses.
If you have the bad habit, and everybody has it, okay, I'm gonna show you immediately how to eliminate that habit, and have a very light left or fretting hand on your guitar. Okay, here's the exercise, it's one exercise that can be applied to everything, okay?
It's super easy, and I recommend you guys do this exercise for a few minutes a day. I don't recommend you do hours of this over and over. I recommend a few minutes a day, occasionally here and there while you practice.
You're gonna see it's very easy, it takes 10 seconds to do. So just do it occasionally while you practice. you practice to remind your hands on how much they have to press okay like everything when you are eliminating a bad habit you are building up the good habit and occasionally the bad habit surfaces again you keep building the good habit and eventually the good habit becomes stronger than the bad.
So don't get discouraged if it takes a little bit of time to shift into the new habit so here's the exercise it's super simple you choose one finger you do it one finger at a time you choose one fret and one string it can be anything okay really just make sure to sample all the string and sample all the frets and use all the fingers eventually but let's say i want to use this index finger on the third string at the fifth fret okay so i just start fretting this note okay one at a time at the beginning and I just tremolo pick it.
I don't have to go fast, I can go slower, okay, so I'm just picking it, no more, no less, then eventually, then what I'm doing is this, I'm releasing the pressure from the finger until the sound chokes, until I get here, it sounds horrible, don't worry, so you start fretting, release the pressure, once you're there, keep picking, and then put back the pressure a little bit, a little bit more, until it starts playing again.
The moment it starts playing again, so when your exact threshold, okay, that's your target pressure, okay, so you want to simply finger something, choke it, and go back until it sounds again, and hold this for a moment and make sure your hands are relaxed, and do the same with the next finger, maybe on the next fret, so choke it, and take it back until it sounds, you could hear a little bit of buzzing,
I hear a little bit of buzzing from the acoustic side of my guitar here, it's not a problem, we are just trying to gauge the exact pressure we need, so don't worry if it buzzes a little bit, okay, next finger the same, you see it's very fast, play, choke it, take it back, once you take it back, you just make a mental note that that's the right pressure to use, okay, so that's the basic version of the exercise.
You start here, how do you apply this to your everyday practice? Well, let's say your practice seems some chords, okay, your practice seems some scale, arpeggios, whatever, okay, you just play the normal thing you're playing, so if you're playing a scale, you're playing something like this, okay, Okay, then you play the normal way, like you normally do, whatever exercise you're doing, then you stop a moment and take the first note of this exercise and do this fret.
Choke, take back, then you do it with the second note of the exercise, the third note of the exercise. Okay, it sounds horrible, I know, but it's just to get the right pressure, and then you do the exercise again, trying to stay at that shoulder, at that threshold, before you can fret as hard as you can, then you do this exercise for all the notes, and then you try to play it, staying as light as you can.
If you're doing it right, some of those notes will choke, because you are not incredibly, absolutely precise, and if you try to stay at the threshold pressure. you will err a bit on both sides, so occasionally some of those notes will just choke.
That's okay, that's expected. Again we are just trying to find the right pressure. You're trying to educate your hand to play just as light that is physically possible. So what happens is that you have a bad habit of pressing too much and you build a good habit of pressing as little as possible and what your brain is doing is that gradually it will take you from one to another so gradually your natural pressure you put will go lighter and lighter and lighter and lighter.
It takes a bit of time but you get there. So you just try to be as extreme as possible in building a good habit so you pull the bad habit on this side. That's how you do it. If you're doing arpeggios it's the same thing.
You do the same for all the notes of the arpeggio. If you're doing chords it's slightly different so especially if you have those super big complex chords, okay, super wide that requires a lot of pressure on your hand, you do that.
You finger the chord then you take the chord one at a time but you leave the other fingers in position. So I do the lowest note the second note, next note, next note. For every note again I play it, I relax until it chokes and then it can come back and then I leave that finger at that pressure and I go on the next finger and do the same job there and essentially I'm recalibrating finger by finger and what you're going to see in these exercises is that the pressure that you require to make those notes sound.
It's way less than what you were expecting. and the more you do it the more your brain realizes that and the more you are starting to relax okay so that's the only thing you need to do but you have to do it in between your normal exercises so if you're playing a solo pick some of the notes of this lick and do this exercise, pick the next note of this lick and do this exercise break apart all your licks.
All your exercises, everything you play this way it's done while you normally play, not in artificial situations like warming up Not instantaneous, nothing is instantaneous, but in a few weeks you will feel your hand relaxing a lot and be much lighter on the fretboard.
And this already takes you probably 90 percent through, not saying perfection, but at least a comfortable guitar technique. And then from there you can adjust and see what needs to be done. It is a very simple exercise.
I didn't even invent it. Some people told it to me. I put my own spin on this, but some people told it to exist to me. It's very simple. You guys can use it. You can use it on anything and everything.
And this works on electric guitars, acoustic guitar, etc. Of course, if your guitar is out of setup or the action is very high, the minimum pressure is still considerable. But at least you are not using more than that.
So you can use this on an acoustic guitar to find exactly how much pressure you need for that guitar to play a chord or to play that note. On an electric guitar it would be different. So I know the next question you guys are gonna have is what if I'm playing both acoustic and electric, you do this exercise on both instruments and your brain is not stupid and eventually it will figure out that the default pressure for electric and the default pressure for acoustic are different.
So when you grab the electric your hands will use the right pressure automatically. When you grab the acoustic your hands will use the right pressure automatically, but you need to practice this exercise in both situations.
That's a guitar technique thing, but you guys know I specialize in music theory. If you need help in music theory go to my website musictheoryforguitar.com. I have several courses there available for anybody.
If you need some more technical advice, no problem, write me down in the chat. I also have a couple of people that I know that are even better than me and explaining techniques, so in case I can give you their website.
So just write on the comment if you want to have more answers or more recommendation on who to go to to learn technique. Okay, this is the Tommaso Zillio of musictheoryforguitar.com and until next time, enjoy!