In this lesson, I want to continue to discuss the idea of having a light touch when playing guitar. When you first start out learning to play guitar, the tendency is to train your muscles to tense up. In all honesty, this is perfectly normal. Because, when you are starting out, you simply haven't developed the muscles in your arms and hands or the motor skills to do many of the complex movements that go along with executing exercises on your guitar. So, it is natural at that point to tense up in order to compensate for these initial deficiencies until you develop these skills. What ends up occuring is that the brain becomes conditioned to automatically opt to tense up your muscles and most guitarists play for years never even realizing that they are playing with so much tension. Eventually, this over tensing can lead to a lot of unnecessary muscle soreness in the arms and hands.

Then one day they are watching their favorite guitarist pull off these amazing super fast runs all over the guitar neck. But, try as they might, they work and work and work only to find out that they keep slamming up against a speed barrier that they just can't seem to work through. When I was facing this problem, I didn't have anyone around who could give me clear insight into what the problem was. I tried everything I could think of to overcome this limitation, but nothing seemed to work. It never hit me that the primary problem was that I was fighting my own muscle tension to no avail. To me, my muscle tension didn't seem abnormal. The reason is because my mind was conditioned to be used to a certain level of muscle tension that was by all reasoning normal in my own mind. Bothered by this problem, I sat down and started to think about the mechanics of what was going on more intently. And then it hit me. The more tension I used to push the strings down and hold them, the more I had to work to release that note and press down another note. So, from here I developed the playing on a cloud exercise to overcome this problem of over tensing while playing.

I literally started thinking of my strings as a fluffy cloud. And having four fingers, I placed my index finger on E7, my middle finger on E8, my ring finger on E9, and my pinky on E10. But, instead of pressing the strings down, I relaxed my hand as much as humanly possible and started touching each note in order with a very light touch. You just want to graze the strings. If you get the note to sound off by touching the string, you are pressing way too hard. This exercise is more to retrain the brain to not automatically tense up your hand while playing. This is something you will have to contend with for the rest of your life as a guitarist--especially when learning to execute new pieces. Your brain will want to tend to tense up to meet the challenge, but you will have to correct this tendency by intentionally relaxing your hand and using some sort of mental imagery to help your mind relax so that your hand will follow suit and relax as well.

The trick is to remember what you already know. Signals from the brain to the muscles in your arms and hands cause varying degrees of tension to appear. In some cases it is perfectly fine to let the brain automatically tense up to a certain degree, because the brain's memory of what it needs to do is adequate for getting the job done. At other times, it is important for us to retrain the brain to adjust the amount of tension it uses when playing through a piece. Once you condition the brain to the proper tension level and the proper conditioned movements, the brain will automatically remember what it needs to do and your execution of the exercise will improve tremendously.

Now, let's extend this idea of a light touch to all the strings by playing the following exercise.


E7i, E8m, E9r, E10p
A7i, A8m, A9r, A10p
D7i, D8m, D9r, D10p
G7i, G8m, G9r, G10p
B7i, B8m, B9r, B10p
H7i, H8m, H9r, H10p

Remember, the idea is to just lightly graze the string while keeping the fretting hand as relaxed as possible. After doing this many times, you can start to increase the tension to the point of playing the notes, but continue to try to keep the fretting hand relaxed. Now, after doing this for a long time, I can fret my acoustic nearly as fast as i can fret my electric. But, my acoustic is set up with low action, so I am not fighting the strings to get the notes to sound out properly. If the strings on your guitar sit really high off the fretboard, this will only encourage your brain to tense up more and more to fight with the strings to get the notes to ring out. So, if you have this problem, it might be a good idea to take your guitar in to have the action set lower by a professional guitar tech.


Corey J. Bray