Fretting or Picking Hand - Which Do You Find More Difficult?

[jazzyfan]

The RH is by far the more difficult to train.
You might notice that there is a Cracking The Code organization which is all about the RH.
There is no comparable thing for the LH.
Amateurs always think that the LH is the most important.
Of course they are mistaken.

[pauln]

If your head (ear and musical mind) is ahead (great ideas) of your hands (difficulties), then you may sound like good ideas executed imperfectly. Virtually all the best jazz is that sound! Good ideas are heard through and appreciated in spite of imperfection.

If your hands (execution) are ahead (mastery) of your head (poor ideas), then you may sound like perfectly executed poor ideas. Virtually all the worst pop is that sound! Poor ideas are heard through and unappreciated in spite of perfection.

[Christian Miller]

No guys trust me, we're not like those nerdy jazz guitar forum members who analyze the minute details of right and left hand technique. We're the cool jazz guitar forum member who analyze the minute details of right and left hand technique. Those other guys are total losers.

Quite so


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[jameslovestal]

The RH is by far the more difficult to train.
You might notice that there is a Cracking The Code organization which is all about the RH.
There is no comparable thing for the LH.
Amateurs always think that the LH is the most important.
Of course they are mistaken.

Amateurs want-to-be jazz musicians think the LH is most important, but I don't think that applies to rock and blues players, based on my experience.

E.g. learning how to play the few scales and chord grips used in rock and blues is fairly simple and doesn't require a lot of memorization. Thus the RH is where these players can get a lot of variation, as wells as speed with their limited LH knowledge.

[Christian Miller]

Well fella-mi-lad, have you ever practiced the left hand only with a metronome eh? eh?

Will literally change your life.

[pamosmusic]

Well fella-mi-lad, have you ever practiced the left hand only with a metronome eh? eh?

Will literally change your life.

Youre not kidding. You don’t know economy of motion until you see how much time your left hand wastes.

I did a lot of hands separate playing during the aforementioned stint with carpal tunnel to give my hands as much rest as I could without taking a full break. I was getting ready for my senior recital at the time.

So I would ask you this, fella mi lad … ever practiced the right hand only with a metronome?

[Christian Miller]

Youre not kidding. You don’t know economy of motion until you see how much time your left hand wastes.

I did a lot of hands separate playing during the aforementioned stint with carpal tunnel to give my hands as much rest as I could without taking a full break. I was getting ready for my senior recital at the time.

So I would ask you this, fella mi lad … ever practiced the right hand only with a metronome?

I know I should but that is srsly brain numbing

[jim777]

I've had surgery on both of my wrists (both for arthritis) but it's always been my right hand. How those shredders who sweep do it is crazy to me.

[pamosmusic]

I know I should but that is srsly brain numbing

it is indeed.

i credit this with the fact that I was able to make it through my cello suite without a devastating memory slip

[James W]

Doing open string exercises for the right hand-only fingerstyle is enjoyable.

[pamosmusic]

Doing open string exercises for the right hand-only fingerstyle is enjoyable.

I bought that Werner technique book after you mentioned it

[CliffR]

About ten years ago or so I realized I couldn't play clean at decent speeds. Somebody recommended a book called 'Speed Mechanics For Lead Guitar' by Troy Stetina. Pretty good book, I think, and through it I came to the conclusion my right hand was letting me down. I spent several years going down the rabbit hole of trying to improve my picking. I followed Pebber Brown for a while (a proponent of scalpel and sarod picking, as well as the more 'classic' style). Then came Troy Grady with his escape motion notion. I spent way too much time on all this, I feel in retrospect - I'm still not a 'fast' player - but I have finally settled on a right-hand technique that's reasonably relaxed and I'm happy with.

There's lots of concern about moving between strings, but one of the early exercises in Stetina's books is an Ynwie stylle lick that moves up and down a single string. After all that picking work, I found I *still* couldn't play it at a decent speed. And then I realised it was actually my left hand that was letting me down. Was that the problem all along? Or had I improved my right hand to the extent that now the left hand was the problem? But picking quickly on one string is not really a problem.

Anyway, I'm happy now to be focussing on making music and not worrying about how fast I can play. (I dare say that's what all failed shredders tell themselves ).

This is the sort of thing Pebber Brown encouraged folks to practice:

[Mick-7]

There's lots of concern about moving between strings, but one of the early exercises in Stetina's books is an Yngwie style lick that moves up and down a single string. After all that picking work, I found I *still* couldn't play it at a decent speed. And then I realized it was actually my left hand that was letting me down. Was that the problem all along? Or had I improved my right hand to the extent that now the left hand was the problem? But picking quickly on one string is not really a problem.

I think that synchronization of both hands is key to picking accuracy and speed, so in that sense neither hand is more important than the other, they are codependent.

[pauln]

According to Wikipedia, it's the cerebellum... (wow!)

has been implicated in the regulation of many differing functional traits such as affection, emotion including emotional body language perception^[38] and behavior.^[39][40] The cerebellum, Doya proposes, is best understood as predictive action selection based on "internal models" of the environment or a device for supervised learning, in contrast to the basal ganglia, which perform reinforcement learning, and the cerebral cortex, which performs unsupervised learning.^[33][41] Three decades of brain research have led to the proposal that the cerebellum generates optimized mental models and interacts closely with the cerebral cortex, where updated internal models are experienced as creative intuition ("a ha") in working memory.

The cerebellum contains more neurons than the total from the rest of the brain, but takes up only 10% of the total brain volume.[11] The number of neurons in the cerebellum is related to the number of neurons in the neocortex. There are about 3.6 times as many neurons in the cerebellum as in the neocortex

Purkinje cells receive more synaptic inputs than any other type of cell in the brain—estimates of the number of spines on a single human Purkinje cell run as high as 200,000.

1. Divergence and convergence: In the human cerebellum, information from 200 million mossy fiber inputs is expanded to 40 billion granule cells, whose parallel fiber outputs then converge onto 15 million Purkinje cells.^[11] Because of the way that they are lined up longitudinally, the 1000 or so Purkinje cells belonging to a microzone may receive input from as many as 100 million parallel fibers, and focus their own output down to a group of less than 50 deep nuclear cells.^[28] Thus, the cerebellar network receives a modest number of inputs, processes them very extensively through its rigorously structured internal network, and sends out the results via a very limited number of output cells.

[princeplanet]

I think that synchronization of both hands is key to picking accuracy and speed, so in that sense neither hand is more important than the other, they are codependent.

^^^ Exactly. The left hand is limited by the right, and vice versa. I try practicing difficult things using only one hand at a time, then try to bring them together. Synchronisation is not discussed very much, but i've recently started practicing alternate picking arpeggios as an exercise towards possible improvement of the sync mechanics. You learn a lot about your technique doing that, for one thing, I'm getting a lot of shoulder pain, despite any attempt at trying avoid the elbow and shoulder as much as possible as part of my action. The pick grip and slant etc are critical to sync precision and we need to find what works best for us individually, even if it takes a while to undo inefficient habits acquired over many years...

[starjasmine]

^^^ I'll have to agree with both Prince and Mick - my own experience is that working through limitations in one hand exposes previously hidden limitations in the other. I was happy with my RH technique till I stumbled across a lick that I just could not play cleanly at speed. This led me down a rabbit hole that got my RH together to the point at which I could pick said lick faster than I could fret it. So then I worked on LH efficiency as well as eliminating any hesitation in my recall of the phrase so I could execute the lick legato-style in the LH at a much faster speed than I could pick it. So now I'm back to working out additional RH details that are currently making that hand the lagger. Along the way, I found myself focusing on hand sync and on string crossing. I still don't have all of this together at the level I want, but pleased to say that it looks like I'm getting there.

I also discovered that focusing on picking technique extensively ramps up RSIs a lot quicker than normal playing. Focusing on the R in RSI really jacks up the SI... like, I used to play ALL day EVERY day without any pain. Then I went down this rathole on picking and found myself dealing with various kinds of pain. I could tell which muscles were being used by each picking technique just by what hurt the next day. I was a bit worried about the physical price of the new RH technique, but it seems like the pain goes away if I take a day off... and my latest/best RH approach is very similar to what I was doing for all those years before! Which is surprising and odd... so I guess short story long is that it ALL matters and you have to put together all the skills necessary to make music... whichever kind of music you are trying to make... and that the skill set can vary from song to song, style to style, person to person...

@PP I found that wrist rotation seemed to cause me the most shoulder pain. (i.e. keeping the wrist straight and rotating the wrist/forearm to make the pick move, as opposed to a back-and-forth or "strumming" motion where the forearm remains planted and the wrist deviates from the line that extends from the elbow to the tip of the index finger.) Now, I know some ppl (gypsy players like Joscho) seem to do this all the time without issue, but it caused pain for me. I haven't tried icing the shoulder after playing... should do that if the pain continues. And I may be able to do it if I don't OVER do it - see my previous rant about too much R aggravating the SI...

I'm actually leaning towards a Dennis Sandole move-the-whole-forearm approach now and it seems to be working very well. Pick slanting and escape seems to be what is improving my control most now.

UPDATE: Having read the question more carefully, I'd like to change my answer to "Right hand" from "neither" but IDK how. Seems to me that RH presents more difficulty, but maybe (as Peter? said) that's because I've put in so much more time on LH ... my RH is less "educated" than my RH.

[Jonah]

It depends...
For some people right hand goes very easy and they get a good sound and control quickly (but the other side of it they do not invest a lot into it in the beginning and at an advanced level they have to review their picking to get more nuances).

Serious guitar playing is difficult: too many things are going on simultaneously. Co-ordination, efficiency.

I see that people focus a lot on left hand (but at the same time there are so many cases that the basics are poor and this determinate further difficulties that people try to overcome for years).

But I believe left hand is something that can be solved more or less quickly with correct guidance but developing/deepening tone control, especially on acoustic instruments and in complex polyphonic texture can be a lifetime journey.

[brent.h]

What Pasquale Grasso and Cecil Alexander have in common

In this thread, djg made an observation, and I didn't quite get it until dasein expounded on the importance of relaxing the left hand quickly.

I play/practice this way now, and I noticed my fretting hand moves a little more quickly now.

[joebloggs13]

I voted neither. For me, the biggest challenge is timing both the picking and fretting so that the notes don't get cut off. Now, it's easy to get nice smooth transitions when you are picking slow, but when you pick up speed, timing is crucial. I find that when I get close to max speed, the notes sound choppy, for lack of a better description. This is what I need to work on.

[olliehalsall]

I've only recently started locking my right hand in with my left where the two just synchronise well. This was totally subconscious though. And then yesterday I came across an Emily Remler clip where she says I don't care about the right hand

[MiniMerckx.22]

It's really all controlled by the the cauliflower between your ears rather than any appendage.

[James W]

It's really all controlled by the the cauliflower between your ears rather than any appendage.

Telekinesis?

[MiniMerckx.22]

Telekinesis?

Caulikinisis.

[Robertkoa]

Once you get really good at alternate picking , you can drive your fret hand and focus it rhythmically that way.

I have a very short distance from knuckle to first joint on fretting hand .....

Technical : I always hated how the thumb behind neck is arbitrary [ unless you have large hands and can leave thumb UP behind neck / or curled over top of neck = like a violinist .
On Chords the voicing itself for me determines where the thumb is and I don't think about that and use up to 6 frets wide .

But on solos and for freedom and legato type speed I developed for myself and NAMED it for myself [ lol ] called 'index finger lock ' so my thumb floats BEHIND the neck but the >web of index finger and base of index is always against the bottom [ toward floor ] of neck- THEN for bends and vibrato thumb goes right up over top.

This WIDENS my fret hand for solos and avoids the choppyness of struggling to keep up with alt picking during solos.

But better to have large hands.

My fret hand is almost 3/4" longer than my picking hand because of the closed voicings I use and others in expanded R&B type stuff.

If you are working on your ' time ' practice over recordings with percussion or over quantized grooves .

A metronome is OK but has no 'pocket '.

A lot of King of Time George Benson ( lol ) - his live group has
a rhythm guitarist AND percussion.

Unless ballads - it is difficult to play behind the beat with this kind of rhythm section so it might sharpen your time then you can back down a bit [ relaxed time ] IF you play with a 'Jazz Drummer ' depending upon the tune.

I think whether picking with pick , thumb , thumb and index alternate, Classical Rest Strokes , plucking voicings like piano or rhodes, for 99% of players the picking hand drives the time and the fret hand follows obediently , hopefully .?