Quote:
Originally Posted by ARiley
. . . do you all have any recommendations that will help me regain flexibility -- and stretch! -- in that nondominant little left hand?
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Yes! I really like this exercise for flexibility and stretch. I found it in Scott Tennant's book,
Pumping Nylon, but here's someone demonstrating it on youtube:
He's obviously using a classical guitar, but there's no reason you can't do the same exercise on a steel string, and use a pick if that's how you play.
Improving flexibility and stretch helped me a lot with barres. When I started, on some of the shapes it was really hard for me to keep the barre close to the fret
and stretch to reach other notes in the chord and get those fingers up close to the appropriate fret, too. I'd get buzz, I'd squeeze harder, which didn't help, and for a long time I was sure I just couldn't play barres. (I was self-teaching, which didn't help since I had no one to critique my technique.) Eventually I figured out that getting
all the fingers in the right places (ie right behind/almost on top of the frets) made a big difference. So I practiced up on the higher frets where the stretches are shorter, as has been suggested above, and I worked on improving my reach. It helped a lot. (So did a good setup. And a short scale guitar with light strings.
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