Hey Friend,
Another aspect of guitar playing that you don’t often hear talked about is the coordination between your two hands.
As I’ve said, most of the focus goes to the fretting hand, but the picking hand is the one doing the work to bring the sound forth.
You hands need to work both independently and in concert with each other. Otherwise, you’re playing will sound sloppy and amateur.
Thankfully, our hands don’t work like our eyeballs.
One hand works completely independently of the other, and that can cause you to play off beat if you don’t have much experience with rhythm. Coordinating movements can also take some time to learn.
When you begin learning guitar, there’s not a lot of demand put on your picking hand to be accurate because we typically practice very simple stuff.
That’s okay!
There’s a lot to learn, and just being able to strum on beat is a good starting place.
But as you improve, you need to sharpen those early skills to increase your precision. Here’s what I mean:
A simple exercise like strumming chords to a four beat measure is not too challenging, especially at a slow tempo (speed). Both hands can do what they need to do and you can easily play along with the song/exercise.
As an exercise becomes more complex with chord or note changes, each hand has to follow a different set of instructions from your brain and learn its own part.
The better you learn how to do this, the cleaner your playing sounds.
There’s a problem, though. Many, many guitar instructors don’t put the necessary focus on giving your picking hand the attention it needs to help you become a better guitar player.
But focus you must, if you want to get better.
We’re going to look at ways to give your picking hand the attention it needs to get your two hands in sync with each other.
We’ll start on that tomorrow - have a rockin’ day!
Peace~
Dave
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