Finger Tips

I've received a great deal of sound advice over the years, but one of the most important lessons I learned was when I was studying classical guitar briefly during the 1980s - and that was to keep an open mind when it comes down to left hand fingering. My teacher - Bob Jones - told me that I shouldn't necessarily mistrust the fingering suggestions I was seeing on the music in front of me, merely that it was a healthy habit to question them.

'Always consider that there might be an easier way to play the same series of notes...'

After all, the guitar is a hard task master, as we all know, and anything that makes playing that little bit easier should be more than welcome.

I soon came to acknowledge that left hand fingering was crucial and that the difference between getting it right and getting it wrong was often success or failure when it came down to achieving a satisfactory level of performance for any given piece. I found too that this practice isn't confined merely to the strict regimes that exist in classical disciplines - it applies equally to any style of music which is arranged for the guitar.

In my own teaching practice I'd often see students who were struggling to play a piece they were learning and they would be amazed at how it could be rendered so much easier with just a little rethink where the left hand was concerned.

So how to we actually administer an open-minded approach to left hand fingering? First of all, let's consider some facts and figures:

A 21 fret guitar covers just under four octaves which gives us just 46 unique pitches - roughly half that of a piano. But the guitar appears a lot larger than that when you consider that it has 22 notes per string which gives us 132 notes available (i.e. 22 × 6) most being duplicates!

In fact, there are only 10 notes on the fretboard that can be found in only one place (five on the bass E between frets 0 and 4 and another five on the top E between frets 17 and 21). The rest of them are backed up in varying degrees.

The amount of options open to you varies across the guitar's range - there are two places where you can find the pitch of your open A string (open A and the fifth fret on the bass E). But there are no less than five locations for the C at the first fret, second string (first fret second string, fifth fret third, ninth fret fourth, fifteenth fret fifth and twentieth fret sixth).

I admit that it's enough to put your head in a spin at first, but after years of teaching, editing and transcribing music, I've developed a kind of instinct for tracking down practical fingerings. If I come across something that seems very difficult in one location, I'll always consider as many different fingering options as I can before settling on the one I think is probably 'correct'. And when I write music I never settle for my first choice - I remember that sage advice given to me years ago to keep my options open and consider as many other locations as I can before settling on one.

So if you find yourself working out a solo or a riff, always remember to spend a little time checking that you've found the optimum left hand fingering for it. Yu needn't know where all the notes on the fretboard are by name, try finding them by ear - the result is much the same. I can assure you that it will refine your playing enormously!

As a footnote to this, I'd like to share a story that illustrates the fact that even when you're armed with acute senses like the ones described above, you can still trip up. An old friend was attending a masterclass with the classical guitarist John Williams and was told to prepare a certain piece for the class to study on the day. I forget which the piece was, unfortunately, but it depended on a repetitive B in the bass throughout. My friend knew that this particular pitch was only found in two places on the fingerboard - on the second fret, A string and the seventh fret on the low E. So that meant that those two locations 'bracketed' the left hand fingering for him - everything had to played in either the second or seventh positions.

It was a struggle - a difficult piece - and being somewhat short on fingering options meant some big stretches and awkward barrés. But after weeks of work he succeeded in getting the piece up to a good level of fluency and left for the masterclass.

When he arrived, the first thing John Williams said was that it was immediately apparent that the piece was entirely dependent on the repetitive B in the bass and so, to make everything that much easier, he suggested everyone retune their A strings to B. Doh!

David Mead

www.italkguitar.com