I think that the common denominator to fine guitar playing is the fretting hand. From style to style and genre to genre the articulation differs but an intelligent piece of music generally uses a well worked out fretting hand.

You can actually see the music without hearing it if you view the fretting hand. You can see the texture, the harmonic content while watching that hand. An articulation hand tells you nothing except if it is fingerstyle, pick style or some hybrid of the two.

Teaching and playing for over 30 years I've seen all manner of fretting hand problems. I'm mostly self-taught.

In 1988, Stuart Fox, my mentor at California Institute of the Arts, told me that he was completely amazed at my left hand.

He said it was so bad that it was just amazing that I could play such complex music with it. It was accurate and robust but it was spastic and way off axis with the neck.

Undue pressure applied to the neck by the fretting hand and the orientation of the whole fretting apparatus to the fretboard is basically what he was talking about. Posture.

To depress a note to the board does not require what I consider to be the same function of a C-clamp, equal pressure from both sides of what is clamped.

How much pressure does it take to make a note sound? Do you need to engage the fretting hand thumb to depress a string? Maybe the "choke" is necessary to bend a string but certainly not to depress it.

The whole idea of using minimum amounts of force and pressure do not enter into our daily lives. In other words, when we eat Jell-O do we use more pressure to crack through the 1/8th inch harder film and decrease the pressure when we get down to the Jell-O proper? Are we weighing the spoon and the Jell-O contents and using the exact amount of muscle power and force to dump it into our pie-hole?

How about when we scoop up the phone when it rings? Are we spending the concentration of a Yogi to carefully weigh the phone and are we exerting just the right amount of muscle power needed to shove it towards our pie-hole to say "Howdy?"

These may seem like absurd questions but it serves to juxtapose these kinds of actions to the action of the application of pressure to the fretboard. In the kitchen it is more akin to opening a jar; we use then very amount of force needed to open a very stiff lid. We keep pouring the muscle on just to the point of opening the lid.

Please don't get in your mind that the pressure needed to depress a string is equivalent to a 40-year-old jar of pickled pig-feet, rusted and stuck by osmosis. You need less pressure to depress a string than you need to open any jar.

Gravity and Down-Pressure
Our physical world of the guitar is slightly tilted when we consider gravity. Down is on an angle other than 90%.

In our physical world gravity is straight down. This sticks us to the ground and we should consider the fretting hand fingers the same although in a psychological way.

No psychology in taking a walk or dropping our house keys to the floor but dropping a finger to the fretboard, we have to involve ourselves in fooling the fingers to fall like gravity forced us to.

This psychological gravity is best facilitated by the posture of the guitar in the body. If you know about the "classical" guitar posture and was never really told in strict terms what the reason was for doing this, the reason is to facilitate psychological gravity or down pressure in the fretting hand. It's mainly made easy for the fretting hand with posture.

Certainly the fretting hand does not hold the guitar into position in any way. The guitar is firmly held by the articulation arm. This leaves the fretting hand free to roam without the constraints of bearing weight regardless of wearing an electric guitar or sitting with a classical one, no weight should be borne by the fretting hand.

The gravitational pull, that is the gravity we've created in our minds, is towards the lower wall behind us, in line with or elbow and therefore the fingers.

Bubba, here with the guitar, is Robert Walker, my former student and winner of the First Annual New Millennium Guitar Giveaway in 2002. Forget the young man is not wearing a tux. His hair is long and his clothes are grunge chic. He is postured in the classical way. His spine and shoulders make a straight "T."

The Fretting Apparatus' Orientation to the Fretboard is dictated by the position of the headstock. The headstock of the guitar should be even with your ear.

Your 4th finger is the smallest and weakest finger. The open A Major chord formation doesn't translate into equal access to the fretboard.

This is the main consideration when confronting the configuration of the human hand for fretting.

Consider playing an open A major chord with fingers 1, 2 and 3. Consider almost any open chord and you'll see that the 4th finger location is further away from the neck than the 1st finger.

This shape functions in the fingering of open chords, the reason being that the finger best depresses a note when it's the closest to the "pitch" fret that demarcates the note's physical area.

Note how, if you orient the equal access principal, the 1st finger's position in the fret area is dangerously low to the wrong side of the lower fret.

This equal access of the 1st and 4th fingers causes the "e" note in the A major chord to buzz and adds pressure to making it sound good.

Conclusion: Open chord hand positions are only good for open chords and should be dispensed with when leaving the open chord area.

What is the Apparatus?
What I say about the classical posture will apply to those forms of guitar that require the intelligent fretting hand.

The major part of the human body that is involved in fretting is the whole arm-to the shoulder.

The shoulder, elbow, arm, hand and fingers. Notice that I left out wrist? It doesn't exist. A wrist is used in a C-clamp, to squeeze. We don't squeeze the neck. We pull/drop the finger to the neck but first creating the alignment of the whole apparatus. We let it "fall" to the fretboard from the spread we establish in the fretting hand. The spread is the lowest and highest frets in the position.

The Fretting Hand Thumb
Oh, if we were guitar-playing monkeys we'd have an extra digit to address the fretboard. I am serious about this when I say that I would trade a monkey-like thumb for my human opposable thumb when I play the guitar only on my fretting hand. Forget the monkey feet although that would be interesting but would necessitate a new stringed instrument.

Some of us use our thumbs to fret the 6th and 5th strings. It is quite handy in folk music to grab an F# in a d major chord. It is also useful in other respects but forget about it.

The textural composition of the music is the key factor of how we use our fretting hand and the earlier mentioned posture and the thumb are central to the covering of the musical materials.

Counterpoint or polyphony is the most rigorous music in our guitar playing traditions. Lines of musical content sometimes go in opposite directions and the fretting hand is taken to the physical limits of it's spread and hold-move finger configurations.

If we have to move quickly either up, down the neck or across, it is imperative that the pressure from the thumb be extremely limited or nonexistent. To have undue pressure in the thumb (the C-clamp) would be like having the parking brake on while you press the gas pedal of your car in gear; you are not going anywhere fast.

What it is we're moving up and down the neck is in a fixed shape. From the shoulder to the knuckle should be fused into a fixed shape that moves up, down or across the neck. It should hang there letting gravity pull it to the floor while hinged against the fretboard.

That is part of the down pressure and the only point that the fretting apparatus is subject to earth's strict gravity. The second major part is the pulling of the fingers, to the fretboard, from the shoulder.

Choreography
Next I will talk about trigger fingers and their role in operating the thumb in terms of a rhythm pattern to the other functions of the fretting hand.

In the example given we have a chromatic figure in 6/8 that has a lot of implications.

The first descending and the fourth finger ascending have a role in signaling the hand to process a shift.

After all the first finger is the last finger before you, either, slide or shift the hand to another spread.

Above we talked about the whole attitude of the fretting hand. It concerned gravity and posture and the fingers basically falling by psychological gravity to the frets.

With this example all the fingers are down onto the fretboard when posturing it and thinking about the thumb.

The thumb, addressing the back of the fretboard, is the all-important thing that very few teachers explain properly. The whole interaction of what's on top of the fretboard and what's in behind it, on the back of the fretboard, is synergistic.

In this graphic refer to the seesaw idea based on the fulcrum. The seesaw is level if there are two things of equal weight on.

In respect to the spread of the fingers, there is a center point and it is between the second and third finger. Consider it position 2 and ½. This is where the thumb goes, directly behind the fingers and this balances the hand in the spread.

If this were an isolated passage the whole spread and attitude of the hand would have gotten there by a matter of shifting the apparatus while the hand was barely touching the fretboard.

Certainly we all trigger the fingers off of the neck but the whole feeling of taking the whole fretting hand off of the neck is a sickening feeling for most of us.

Posture solidifies the physical contact with the guitar from the momentary absence of contact the hand experiences.

In the first example you are told to lightly take your thumb off of the back of the neck every time you depress fingers one and four and example two is the reason for example one. When you shift you must lift the fingers and the thumb off of the neck.

The fusing of the fretting hand thumb into a fixed posture is a very important. First of all it relieves tension and focuses the position of the fingers.

The thumb is rather a useless thing if you don't need it to pressurize a note to the fretboard but it is that part of the machine that sets the fingers.

The elbow needs to be directly below the fingers and not into the ribcage. If this is so then the elbow could shift early and be an anchor for the arrival of the hand.

The elbow also triggers fingers two and three to rise so that you can bring finger four close to the first finger as it shortens the distance it has to travel with the earlier spread.

The whole thing with strap buttons
Posture, when thinking about electric guitar, is part strutting and part playing.

We are talking about a maraca with strings in the band, the rhythm guitar is not required to move around the neck quickly or walk fingers through intricate patterns of wide voiced counterpoint.

Lead guitar often involves small spreads of a minor third, string bends and grouped slurs that repeat themselves.

With this in mind the electric guitar evolved to hang below the chest in the stomach region. You see jazz, Nashville, rockabilly, punk and the plethora of rock players and you see a continuum of musical and social functionality in the strap button placement.

A few electric guitar makers put the strap button somewhere other then the top horn of the forever-copied strat continuum of the imagination wasteland, but most of these make archtops.

The rock electric guitar is starved for middle "C," you know, where you sit at the piano to access with both hands equally.

This whole idea of access dictates the music as much as the social statement. Regardless of the desire to play rich music filled with fully realized guitar parts, if the guitar is in "the other room" you can't do any of the music you imagine.

Copyright 2006, new millennium Guitar Publishing Co., ALL RIGHTS RESERVED