 |
Step Two: How To Use Your Fretting Hand |
Congratulations! You have made it through step one. Now that you are familiar with a few of the essential fundamentals of playing the guitar it is time to actually pick up your guitar and learn how to play!
We will start by learning how to use your fretting hand on the guitar. This beginner guitar lesson will give you some general guidelines on the best way to use your left hand to play the guitar.
The first thing to remember when you start to play the guitar is to relax your fretting hand. You don’t want your hand to be too tense but you want to press down on the strings hard enough to make a good clean sound.
When you start to learn chords and scales you want to make sure that you are curving your fingers and coming down on the very tips of them. Many beginner guitar players make the mistake of letting their fingers collapse across the neighboring strings. This can be bad. When you don’t use the very tips of your fingers the rest of your finger can accidentally mute the other strings.
Finger placement is very important. When you fret a note with your finger, make sure that finger is right behind the fret. Putting your finger in the middle or toward the back of the fret can give you a buzzy or bad sound.
Here is a great video on how to use your fretting hand properly.
Now that you have learned how to use your fretting hand the next lesson will show you how to use your strumming hand.
