Career Beginner: Fret Notes Cleanly - 486

Finger independence exercise

0:00Lee here from Play Guitar Academy. Do you consider yourself a career beginner? What I think a career beginner is, someone who's been struggling, even though they've been playing for years, with some of the same things that they struggled with in the beginning. You've gone past working on these basics, but the same problems remain. What I'm going to be doing today is I'm going to give you a little bit of an exercise to help with some finger independence, and we can start paying

0:30attention to the details. And then after that, I have a whole podcast for you where we get into this, and we're going to make sure that everything that you do moves forward instead of plateauing or going backwards. Okay, let's take a look at our career beginner fret note cleanly exercise here. So what we're going to be doing here is just a modification of a real common technique exercise, and we're going to be taking two fingers at a time in groups. So the first one is for fingers four and three,

1:02second one is for fingers three and two, and the third one is for fingers two and one. And we're just going to be going from fret to fret on the low E string and the A string starting off and then moving across. Let me show you what I mean. So here is the first one using the third finger on the low string, and then the fourth finger on the D string, both at the fourth fret. Now I'm doing that hybrid

1:35picking by picking down on one and then using my middle finger to pluck up. But you can do it with a pick as well. Then I move on to the next string and do the same idea. So make sure when you do this exercise, you do one finger at a time, third fret on the low, fourth fret on the D. We're having

2:08independent fingers. And I'm doing down up picking, but you can do hybrid picking as well. The reason why we're doing it this way is to create some independence between fingers that are next to each other. I had a listener once who was a hand therapist and explained it to me, but this third finger tends to have a mind of its own. It tends to be connected to the other two fingers that are around it. I don't remember exactly what the reasoning is, but I do know if you take a little good quality

2:44time to make sure that that third finger has independence, it helps in everything, scales and chords across the board. So we did that with the fourth finger and the third finger.

2:55Let's move on to the next one. And this is swapping fingers, but doing the same thing. Third and second. We start on the fourth fret. Third, second, first. Now move to the next string. A string to G string. Next string. And then finally the high E string. Let's do fingers two and one on the same exercise. First finger on the fourth fret of the low E string and then the second finger on the D

3:27string fourth fret. And walk them back. Next set of strings. Next set.

3:41This is an incredibly simple exercise but perfect for career beginners because we need to get those fingers working independently and we need each of those notes to come out clean. Like I said, we're going to be focusing in on the details. That's what's going to allow you to move out of career beginner land and into steady progress that you can expect every few weeks to move forward. So where you put your

Fret position and light pressure

4:05finger matters on the guitar. And there's a difference between getting your finger just somewhere inside the fret and putting it in the best position. So what we're going to do is I'm going to switch over to the other camera here. For those who are watching, those listening, take this to heart. Okay, but what we're going to do is put our first finger on the first fret of the high E string. The most basic thing that we can do. And we're going to start to move our finger up and down between the nut and the first fret.

4:38Now if you press down really hard, you'll hear the note no matter where you press down, but it's going to sound in varying places out of tune.

4:50The tuning is going to be different. Now why would that be? Well, if you're pressing down really hard, you're pushing behind the fret and you have a distance between the bottom of the string and the top of the fretboard. That's the height of the fret itself. The more you press down, the higher the pitch of the string goes. Now what we want to do is we want to make sure that when we're pressing down, we're pressing down as light as we possibly can to get a clean sound. So let's start there first. Let's put the first finger behind the first fret and just start to add pressure until the note comes

5:27out clean. That's as hard as you need to push down that fret. Any more. Hear that? It goes out of tune. Now when we have that down and as light as we can with it still being clean behind the fret. Now let's start to move the finger back. Here we go. I'm about a little bit more than halfway towards the nut between the first fret and the nut and I'm already starting to, with the pressure that I have, lose my clean sound. So getting the finger closest to the fret with the lightest amount of touch for

6:05a clean sound is something you need to get used to. Okay, you can do this in your scales, do it with your chords. Now what happens is sometimes, especially because of an A chord, we can't always put one of our fingers right up on the fret where it would take the least amount of pressure to have a clean note. So of course you're going to have to press down a little bit harder on those strings where you can't get close to the fret. And for those listening, I'm playing an A chord where all three fingers,

6:37first, second, and third are all on the second fret right next to each other. There's no way that we can put all those right on the fret. It's very difficult to do. In fact, sometimes what I'll do is I'll play, I'll remove the first finger and use second, third, and fourth fingers there. Because the pinky's smaller, I can get the other two fingers a little bit closer to the fret. You don't have to press down quite so hard. But when I can, say with like a D chord, I love to get my fingers as close to the fret as I can because that's where I can use the least amount of pressure to get a nice clean sound. So

7:11remember, back and forth between the fret with light pressure until you can find the exact place where a nice clean sound comes out and you can use the least amount of pressure possible.

Thumb angle and string muting

7:23So let's move on to the next detail to pay attention to. So we're going to move over to the B string next. Still on the first fret, but I'm going to put my first finger down on the B string. So this is a C note, first fret on the B string. Now I'm going to wrap my thumb around the neck of the guitar. Now what ends up happening is the angle of my finger changes. If I've got my thumb on the back of the neck, my finger can come straight down and it doesn't interfere with the other two strings.

7:59This is the open G, first fret on the B, and the open high E. But if I wrap that thumb around the neck, or if I get my elbow sticking out a little too much, I will accidentally touch the high E string, okay? I'm going to be muting notes. So each chord that we work on, we're going to experiment with the thumb to see if we can get all of those notes out cleanly, okay?

8:30Now if I, it almost sounds like a suspended chord. It actually is one. I'm taking my first finger on the first fret and when I wrap my thumb around, it lays across the fret. And this time it laid across so much, it actually pressed that note down. And so I have an F note on top of my C chord. Suspend fourth, then it goes back. Sloppy angle can interfere with neighboring strings. It can create problems later when we get into all of these new chords. The goal is deliberate contact rather than

9:07simply just getting your finger down on the right fret. There's more to it than just putting the finger down. And a lot of people don't get that far into it and then wonder why it just doesn't work for them. We need a little more detail. So start watching your fingers again. Career beginners often stop looking as they figure, well, that's something I did a long time ago. I can automatically put my fingers down. But if you take some time and really look at the detail of what you're doing, we can clean things up quickly and get you moving forward very fast. The other thing to think about is going a little

9:43faster than you're ready for. So we have a lot of songs that have a lot of high tempos, very quick songs. If you've been playing guitar for a long time, you want to play your favorite songs. These high tempo songs, quick songs, are not going to give you all of the time you need to land your fingers correctly. That's when things start to get a little bit sloppy. So we're going to start slowing things down a little bit so you can notice exactly where your fingers are landing every time. Don't accept close enough. A tiny adjustment produces a noticeably better result. You get a lot more out

10:20of it than you put into it. A few seconds of paying attention to where your fingers go and putting that into practice every day is going to give you the results that you need. Now we talked a little bit about pressure. Remember this, more pressure doesn't automatically create a better note or a better chord. When a note doesn't sound right, we have an instinct. Oh, I'm working on something, I don't have it quite yet. And we have this thought that if we work harder, we're going to get the results

10:52that we need. The problem is with guitar, that translates to pressing down too hard. I have many, many students who complain about pain around the base of their thumb when they're playing. They can't figure out what's going on. They don't remember injuring that, but it just hurts now when they start, especially when they play chords. Where do you think that's coming from? That's coming from clamping down too hard. That introduces unnecessary pressure. Think of it this way. If you press down

11:26harder than you need to, what happens? The string, the pitch rises, okay? So if I have a chord where some notes are open and some notes are fretted, and if the fretted notes are pressed down extremely hard, but the open notes aren't, we have got a big problem. Those, that chord is not going to sound good on its own, much less with anything else. So what you need to do is you need to get practice

11:58fretting chords as lightly as possible.

12:02That's going to be as in tune as they're going to get. Any harder than that is going to push them out of tune. Now the guitar is always a little bit out of tune. It's not a perfect instrument, but this is going to help you not introduce unnecessary tuning problems and hand problems as well too. All of that frustration of not being able to play something well and clamping down hard, you're going to feel it. You'll feel it on the back of your hand and especially the thumb area right there. In fact,

12:34if you're having one of those and you don't think it's arthritis or anything like that, it feels like something mechanical happened. Try this. Try whenever you're playing chords to fret them extremely lightly and see what happens. Make it an exercise. And the last thing to think about when you're struggling with

Active listening in practice

12:54your notes coming out clean and finger placement is don't just play your songs. Don't just play these exercises. Don't feel that just getting through it is enough. You need to start listening instead of just playing. When we're practicing, we're busy. We're trying to remember things and it gets very frustrating. We have a lot of patterns, a lot of chord shapes that maybe just don't come to you or maybe you lose them over time. And we expend all of this energy to remember these things. And then you

13:27have the other problems of, oh, I don't want to sound bad if you're playing in front of other people or you get frustrated because you're playing something. You can play it yesterday well, but today it's not going so well. That causes you to zero in on the problem and not listen to what you're playing. So don't confuse completing an exercise as it being finished. Just because you completed it doesn't mean that it's great. Just because you know how to do something doesn't mean

14:02you know how to play it well. Let's take some time in our practice now to start listening. I really recommend getting your phone, putting the video recorder on, videoing your practice, and then maybe the next day take a look at what you did. Maybe you can do that the first thing of each practice. Look at what you did the last practice. And be critical. You know, listen as just as if you were listening to someone else. Oh, yeah, I like that. But I don't like the way I like his vibrato.

14:34I don't like the way things happen. Oh, there's a couple missed notes there. Be that way with your own playing. A lot of people don't want to hear that. They don't want the reality of what you sound like. You know, a lot of people struggle with that. But I'm asking you to take a leap. You know, do it once or twice just to hear. And you'll know right away, oh, there's a problem with this thing that I never thought about before. So say you're playing a pattern one.

15:06And every time you go to the seventh degree of the scale, one, two, three, four, five, six. In pattern one, we have to jump back to grab that note. And every time you have to jump back, your finger gets out of place. It maybe goes too far. You're just happy to be able to play that.

15:27And it doesn't have to be this. It can be anything. You know, those things that when you play them, every time you hit that one note, it doesn't come out clean. Well, in your practice, whenever you find them, maybe do this for a week or two. And so every time I practice, when I hear a note that doesn't come out clean, I'm going to stop what I'm doing and figure out why that note is not coming out clean. What can I do to play that same run and have each note come out clear?

15:56In this instance, I'm aiming for just behind the fret.

16:02I have to move my whole hand to shift back to the to the fourth area, fourth fret area. So instead of shifting my whole hand, I think I'm going to try to

16:16reach back with my first finger. So my thumb stays where it is on the back of the neck. I'm not shifting my whole hand. And then actually sliding that first finger, now that you're just reaching back for it, instead of moving your whole hand, it's easy to slide that finger back into position.

16:39Little things like that, little details when you're playing scales or chords with finger placement, pressure, or any kind of problems with other fingers getting in the way is worth taking the time. It's not beneath you. These are things that we all have to go over from time to time. I'll be playing something that I've, you know, for years would play okay. And then for some reason, one of the notes would slip or I was trying, maybe I was trying something new and I hadn't spent the time

17:12figuring out my finger placement. I, you go to fix the problem and play the note again. So you're practicing the correction. Don't let these things go by. We want to get to the point where we're past career beginner. We want to get to the point where we know every few weeks, I'm going to feel like I'm really moving forward now. And these little details are anchors. These are holding us back. This is how you stop practicing on autopilot by listening and slowing things down enough that you

17:43can actually hear what's happening or recording it. So later on, you can focus on what you're playing, making those small adjustments, listening for a result. That's what our practice is going to be about to get out of this career beginner problem. Uh, uh, it's a habit and we're going to carry this habit through the rest of this month. I've got a lot of cool career beginner things coming up this month. Um, uh, but you know, you probably already knew how to put your finger on a string before today's lesson. It sounds silly, but that's the point getting out of this stage,

18:20paying attention to these little things that are slipping by that are holding us back. It's not necessarily about piling more information or more practicing onto your plane. It's about taking a break and taking something you've done a thousand times and looking at it. Finally asking, am I actually doing this as well as I could? So you could spend five minutes a day doing this backward spider that we talked about at the beginning of the podcast. Forget about speed. Don't even use a metronome on it. Go for

18:51clear sounding notes. Listen to every single note and see how many clean, relaxed notes that you can put together in a row. And then next time we're going to take that same attention to detail and apply it to something even harder. And that's playing clean guitar chords. Thanks for hanging out with me today. I want to make sure that you know that if you're frustrated with your playing lately, I have some things that can help you. If you've been bouncing around between lessons, uh, you've been learning, just collecting things from the internet, trying to move forward, but you're

19:22not making any real progress. I've made something that I think can help you out. Uh, these are my toolkits. Toolkits are self-contained complete practice systems. Uh, I took everything that you need to practice and get strong foundations, uh, and put them all together in a place where it's very easy to access everything. Uh, so you just go to sit down and you practice. And before you know it, you're practicing things that you didn't, you would spend 20 minutes looking for. It's all right there on your fingers and you're getting results very, very, very quickly. It's all around

19:56a specific area of your guitar playing as well too. So I have a chord toolkit. I have a blues guitar toolkit. Um, beginner toolkits are on the way. I have many, many more toolkits that are coming. They give you the lessons, the exercises, the practice plan, and everything that you need to do that thing. We have something called the vault where I have all the scale patterns and all keys, all the chord progressions and all keys. So, and they're easy to access. So instead of bouncing around looking for the next lesson, you can follow a clear path to start making some real progress.

20:29I'd love for you to check them out if you can over at playguitaracademy.com. Okay, everybody. Thank you very much. More career beginner things next week. And I hope you're doing great. I'll see you soon. Bye-bye.