Tips for Guitarists with Smaller Hands | Tom Strahle | Basic Guitar | Easy Guitar

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[Music] [Applause] [Music] hey they are one of the most common comments I get on my seven tips video is do I have any recommendations for players with smaller hands or people with smaller hands that want to start playing guitar what should they do and it's difficult because I do have larger hands so it's kind of hard for me to imagine that but I do have some tips for you and I just want you to be encouraged to because there are a lot of great players I just googled guitarists with small hands and Paul Simon Andy Summers Randy Rhoads Angus Young from ac/dc those are all players listed as having smaller hands Andy Summers surprised me because for years and years and years I thought every breath you take like this and that's a very difficult stretch between the third and fourth finger and I watched a video just this morning about him playing it live and he actually plays this chord with the second finger instead of the third finger there and the pinky out here and he bounces his first banner so even he's making an accommodation for his hand size he probably couldn't play it this way and I've been playing it this way I've been playing it wrong all these years one thing that happened when I was when I was younger one thing I've noticed is is that if I line up the bottom of my hands my left hand is slightly I mean we're talking a millimeter or two longer than my right hand okay and I'm right-handed but my left hand is slightly longer but what's really dramatic is my spread of my left hand is far wider I'm gonna spread my fingers as far as I can line up my first fingers and you could see how much further my pinky is out that that is just from years and years and years of plain however that may have mostly occurred while I was still growing because I start playing when I was nine I was playing in bands when I was 11 and 12 playing in clubs when I was 13 14 15 and I've been playing ever since pretty much all the time full time so a lot of that growth in my hand it probably came from when I was still growing as a person so but that's but that's you know that may I don't know how much that can happen in your 30s 40s 50s and 60s but it certainly I think the spreading part I think you probably the more you do spreading out chords or scales and things like that you're gonna gonna grow a little bit so you know don't be too discouraged look up two guitar players Django Reinhardt he at the age of 18 there was a fire in his Caravan he was a gypsy and he lived in a caravan and is actually on his wedding night and his whole left hand left side of his body was burned badly he was in the hospital for a very long time and he was already a very good guitar player but his his third and fourth fingers got fused together and unfortunately there's not a lot of videos out there him playing but he's one of the greatest guitar players of all time and he only really had use of two fingers it's astonishing to listen to him play and realize wow what you know how amazing is that Phil kegui is one of the greatest fingerstyle guitarist of all time and he doesn't have half of his middle finger on his right hand so even with drastic limitations you can overcome those let alone just having shorter fingers or or thicker fingers okay I get a lot of questions about what guitar should I get okay that's a tough one I'm going to put some links down below to like baby Taylor and baby Martin and things like that also if your problem is that you have fat fingers sometimes a bigger neck is is a better way to go for example you see my mighty Martin be my Gibson folk singer I play that a lot in my videos that has a basically the neck of a classical guitar it feels like a classical guitar a classical guitar neck is is fatter the strings there's more spacing between the strings so it's a little bit I think easier for someone who's got difficulty kind of fitting all their fingers in in my last video my very last video I talked about how even I I will switch out fingers for an a chord okay so instead of playing an a chord with my first three fingers I play with my second third and fourth fingers so that gives me a little bit more realistic so there's some of that that you can do if you're having trouble squeezing your fingers and then you can read fader some of the voices you may not do them as somebody else suggests you might have to do them in your own way and I may do a video that provides chords for people with smaller hands or thicker fingers and seeing you know if I can kind of accumulate a bunch of those we can work with some of those but I'm going to talk about that more in a little bit okay so now I don't want to discourage you from playing guitar but if you are discouraged and constantly frustrated with it and you're banging your head against the wall sometimes that means you need to make a change and there are so many amazing instruments that don't require as big a hands as the guitar does for example I brought a bunch of them out here probably a very common one is ukulele and ukulele is a great one to start on because you can learn some guitar fingerings the ukulele is basically tuned the top four strings of a guitar at the fifth fret okay so by learning some ukulele chords you're gonna learn you're going to start to recognize some guitar voices so you're going to learn some of that it's also a lot easier to play your hands small effect I have a hard time because it's almost too small for me but a D chord if you play the D shape on a ukulele this would actually be a G chord this is a tenor you could do like a spring [Music] okay and that's much easier to play than a guitar also mandolin now mandolin is not tuned like a guitar so the the the information that you would glean from playing mandolin would not necessarily transfer to the guitar but if you decide that this is your instrument then you can just get plain old good on this because again this is one where the frets are very small if you have small hands to actually an advantage [Music] I mean I have a hard time when I'm playing mandolin kind of squeezing my fingers in there especially beneath the frets up here are very very tiny but you know if you got really you'd be much more it'd be much more fun to get good at something than to be frustrated with something and if you can get you good at mandolin I'll tell you every time I play mandolin anywhere people are like that's the coolest instrument ever also see the foam gonna talk about that later that's a different video anyway a lot of question about that up in the same vein as male in his banjo banjo has got a very skinny neck on it this is a five string [Music] now banjo is a very odd instrument it's not particularly uh it's not like a guitar it's too like an open G chord I mean a lot of you know the main thing about banjo is getting the right hand down that's really though [Music] now that's not my picks on but but basically the the work on the left hand is much more minimal compared to the stuff you're going to be doing on the right hand with banjo and this is a five screen you could also do a four-string banjo you don't even need to fret a dobro you just need to be able to hold a barn and so if if you're very limited with your left hand if you have some injury or something this would be a great instrument because it's such a [Music] it's such a great instrument it's so fun to play and all you have to do is hold a bar and you're all the work is done over here on the right hand and then you just kind of find the notes you want okay also I'm gonna keep going on this theme here we got one more I've had a couple students that they just couldn't get the guitar down so I gotten started on bass and bass this bass in particular this is a Hoffner this is a Beatle bass it's like the one Paul played in the Beatles it's got a very narrow neck it's very easy to play I got flat wounds on here just like they would have the Beatles would have had and you if you have fat fingers of short fingers base particularly bass like this is very good call and you know what if you're playing bass and you're looking for work you're probably gonna be working more than if you play guitar and and if you're playing because everybody needs a bass player in a van every band needs you know and there's lots of people that want to play guitar but there's less people that want to play bass so and I'm insulting bass players but I don't mean to but basically you know pun intended you're going to find that you're gonna get out and play more live and that's that's a lot of fun and that that's that's really the whole reason we're blurring out of play so we can get out and and bless people with our with our music so that's that's other thing that you can do okay we can change the guitar now the other thing that I think this is probably the most important thing and it's very very important for guitar players I think to know all this but one thing you can do is learn all the notes on your fret board I've talked about this before and here's I'm gonna tell you why because as you learn all the notes on your fret board you know what every next single note is on this on the bed and you start to partner that with music theory knowledge okay sure you know you might have trouble playing a G chord C chord a chord whatever you might have trouble playing bar okay but if you learn the notes in the G chord you may realize oh look there's a G chord here there's a G chord right here and all of these are smaller and you want the g7 they're much easier to play than some of these big giant Barre chord okay so that's another thing you can do another thing you can do is if you want you can start playing guitar but just tape over things start the fifth fret a couple things happen one thing the these strings are now at fret height so they're much lower much easier to push down so it's kind of a next way to go as a beginner also the frets are smaller you're basically making it a shorter scale guitar granted you're in the wrong keys of the songs in G you're actually gonna be playing in C [Music] but you could transpose a song so that you can play the songs in the same original key it just would sound like this the original song but then as your fingers get a little stronger as they get to be a maybe grow a little bit or get better at being placed and you can go down a fret and then go down a fret and maybe within a year you're you've got the capo off completely so these are just some tips I just want to encourage you those two to stick with music in general if you have a real love for it but you're really frustrated playing guitar you've got there's lots of ways you can work around that and there's a lot of people that are great players that are playing with smaller hands so don't don't uh don't fret Oh another pun I'm so sorry [Music] god bless you guys talk to you soon [Music]
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Channel: Tom Strahle
Views: 66,024
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: andy summers, angus young, randy rhoads, paul simon, small hands, django reinhardt, phil keaggy, allen holdsworth, banjo, gibson dove, mandolin, ukulele, kala ukulele, goodtime banjo, hofner bass, dobro, gretsch resonator, stubby fingers, fat fingers, guitar lesson, tom strahle, bass
Id: f89kuc9zamQ
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 12min 45sec (765 seconds)
Published: Sat Nov 17 2018
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