By Nicholas Anderson
I’m going to tell you something that is so simple and so obvious that you might think it’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever read. It will help your guitar playing a lot, however, if you’re like most guitarists (I was this way for a long time, so I speak from experience).
Here it is: Your left is different than your right hand.
Duh, right? But when we practice guitar, it isn’t so obvious. For the most part, guitar players act like their left and right hands are either exactly the same, or (for right handed players) their right hand doesn’t really exist.
Let me ask a telling question: what are you looking at when you play your guitar? If you’re like most guitar players, you’re looking at your fretting hand. That’s where all the action takes place. That’s where the magic happens. That’s what we need to focus on.
That isn’t entirely true.
Your picking hand needs as much, if not more, attention than your fretting hand needs. Guitarists tend to neglect the picking hand. About 99% of the time, we watch and focus on the fretting hand. It is true that we need to focus a lot of attention on the fretting hand, however, we often do so to the detriment of the picking hand.
One solution to this problem is to isolate the picking and fretting hands. Whether you’re practicing scales, arpeggios, sweep picking, tapping, a piece of music – really anything involving two hands – you can isolate one hand and focus only on what that hand is doing. This can bring massive results. It will feel a little odd if you’ve never done this before. It may even seem like it isn’t doing much at first, but if you have effective strategies for practicing the technique you’re working on, isolation will be invaluable to your progress.
A good way to incorporate this into your practicing is to pick something you’re working on and play it with only the fretting hand 3-5 times, then do the same with the picking hand. It may take some work to figure out exactly what to play when it comes to the picking hand. After doing this, put them back together again and see if you notice an improvement. It may be a slight improvement at first. The more you do this, the more you’ll notice a difference.
This technique is especially helpful in passages or techniques that present particular difficulties. By isolating, you reduce the level of difficulty to a manageable level (although sometimes the difficulty is far too high for your skill level, which is another issue for another article).
Next time you sit down, think about the fact that your hands are not the same as each other. Remember that they require different training techniques. Your playing problem may reside in your picking hand, which is the hand most guitarists tend to neglect. My hope is that this article will help you detect problems, isolate them, and overcome them so you can reach your musical goals.
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