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Dave Isaacs, Nashville guitar guru and master teacher

Assorted Guitar Lessons

Managing hand pain: should you push through it?

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We’ve all heard the old adage “no pain, no gain”. It might be the right mindset for the gym. But when it comes to playing music, pushing through pain can cause chronic problems. If you’re serious about learning to play well, it’s important to be able to distinguish between normal “growing pains” and something that might be more serious.

Your susceptibility to pain and strain depends on a number of things, but it starts with how much you play. Some people get lost in their playing and look up to find two or three hours have gone by. That’s fantastic for developing your skills, and that kind of devotion to the instrument is a must if you really want to play well.

But playing music is physical, and often involves intricate and highly controlled muscle movement. These muscles are made for facility, not stamina. It takes time to build up the coordination and strength to be able to play for long stretches. This is one of the reasons why an organized practice routine is so important, in that it lets you plan your “workout” the same way you might at the gym. The difference is, you really don’t want to be sore the next day.

Here are some of the common places people feel pain from playing, and how to manage it. Keep in mind that my experience is anecdotal, and I’m not offering medical advice. If a problem persists or you have any question about the seriousness of what you’re feeling, ask a doctor.

1. Fingertips

Most beginners find that their hands get tired or even sore. For a complete beginner or someone who hasn’t played in a long time, pain in the fingertips can be an issue. Building up calluses on the fretting hand takes time and the fingertips can become very sensitive. Even if your calluses are well-developed, periods of more intense playing can leave you with sore fingers. This is a common issue but not a serious one, and it gets better over time.

2. Fret hand thumb

A perfect player with ideal technique on a perfect instrument would never apply any pressure with the fret hand thumb. But regular people do, and beginners and near-beginners tend to push much too hard. This can make the thumb sore at the first joint or at the base, depending on the proportion and shape of your hand.

For most people, adjusting the position of the thumb will relieve some of the pressure. Your hand position should naturally create leverage against the neck; this is usually best achieved with a level, relaxed wrist and curled fingers. But because both hands and guitar necks come in different shapes and sizes, there are always variables.

 

If you’ve ever been told to just push harder, put that thought out of your head for good.

You can almost always make an adjustment to your hand position that will produce more leverage. Start with a level wrist, palm up, and bring your hand to the strings. Let your thumb fall wherever it feels natural. Feel the strings with your fingertips and move the hand around a little to feel how the weight of your hand and arm help hold the string against the fingerboard. If you feel any strain, go with it…allow the tension to release and see what happens. The thumb might lightly rest against the back of the neck, or it might wrap over the top. Trust your body’s feedback and find the position that feels most relaxed and balanced.

If you’re really working hard no matter what you do, your guitar might need an adjustment. Heavier strings and higher action produce a bigger sound, but if you need to really grip to hold them down you should switch to lighter strings or lower the action (height of the strings relative to the fingerboard). Your guitar should be set up to be as playable as possible, while still giving you the sound you want.

Keep in mind as well that your picking hand approach has a huge impact on the tone. If heavier strings are too much work but lighter strings feel too thin, lighten your attack. Minimizing work and effort from the picking hand helps lighten the fret hand as well.

If you have minimized fret hand effort and set up your guitar and still have pain in the joint or at the base of the thumb (especially when you’re not playing), it might be a sign of a more serious issue you should look into.

 

3. Wrist and arm

Pain in the wrist or forearm is potentially more serious. Gripping with the fret hand can make the muscles in the wrist and forearm compress as well, and over time this compression can lead to chronic tension and pain. Many people work too hard when strumming or picking, and overwork the muscles of that arm as well. This can lead to chronic inflammation and, in the worst cases, tendinitis or carpal tunnel syndrome.

If you feel pain in the wrists or forearms when you practice, stop. Take a good look at your hand position to see if you can minimize the effort. If you overdo it and get sore, anti-inflammatory meds like Advil can help. A cold pack or heating pad can really help, just like you would use on any other sore muscle. Some people respond better to one than the other; your body will tell you what works best for you. If pain doesn’t improve after a few days, or becomes chronic, you may want to see a professional. See a doctor if you feel you need to; you may need physical therapy or in worst cases, corrective surgery. There are many other treatment modalities that have proven to be helpful. Massage therapy, Active Release Technique (a form of hands-on physical therapy), acupuncture, and chiropractic can all be beneficial.

 

If you do ever develop a chronic condition, there’s a very good possibility you will need to make some adjustments to your technique.

Hopefully, you’ll never have to deal with any of these problems, or need to fully revamp your technique. It’s not easy to alter the way you play: both good and bad habits become fixed as the movements lock into muscle memory. But whether you’re dealing with a problem now or looking to prevent one, muscles can be trained to develop new ways of working.

 

Minimizing the risk of pain and injury

1. Have your instrument set up to be as playable as possible.

2. Evaluate your technique and cultivate a relaxed, efficient hand position.

3. Be aware of posture. Guitarists tend to slouch, which exacerbates all these problems. Fighting it is a life sentence.

4. Take frequent breaks when you practice, or split your practice sessions up across your day.

5. Stretches and warmups can really help, but only if you do them right. It’s easy to overdo it, so pay attention to your body.

Making the most of your practice time

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Most people start playing an instrument with the expectation that they’ll need to practice, especially if they’re taking formal lessons.

But yet, many people don’t, especially once they’ve developed some basic skill. They might pick up the instrument and try to play new things, but don’t know how to actually improve other than to just keep trying.

Have you ever heard the old adage about the definition of insanity being to repeat the same actions and expect different results?

Practicing is like that. Many people’s practice sessions consist of repeated attempts and repeated failures, without any conscious evaluation of what is and isn’t working. Sometimes that is in fact what needs to happen – at least, the repeated attempts. But each failed attempt also needs to be evaluated: what went wrong?

First of all, it’s important to recognize that if you don’t work in a deliberate way to improve or develop something specific, you’re not practicing. The key word here is “deliberate”: to identify a problem or goal, no matter how large or small, and consciously perform specific actions that will help you solve the problem.

 

This is a huge insight, if a simple one.

Taking this view teaches you to approach practicing as problem-solving, and to use the same mental approach for both small problems and large ones. So practicing virtually anything can be constructive, even if the music isn’t difficult to play. As long as there’s a specific problem to solve, there’s something to be gained from working on it even if it’s a very simple or subtle issue.

That doesn’t mean there aren’t specific things you should be working on, but what those things are will vary depending on your level of skill and experience.

There are fundamentals that are important for everyone, and there are subtleties and details that are specific to particular styles of playing. If you’re taking lessons, you can reasonably expect your teacher evaluate your playing and decide what needs improvement. But whether you have a teacher or not, you have the same responsibility to yourself: to honestly (and gently) identify problems and shortcomings, and make sure your practice time is directed at solving them.

 

Break it down

Everything you do on the guitar requires a mechanical action: a specific movement or series of movements, driven by a thought or intention. It’s a fundamental law of the universe that every mechanical problem has a mechanical solution, once you can reduce things down to their essential components. In other words, if you can’t play something, it’s because your hands aren’t accomplishing the movement they need to in a deliberate and controlled way. This might sound obvious, but consider this: it’s one thing to say that you can’t execute a part, but it’s another to recognize that your little finger isn’t landing cleanly on that high note in measure 3. Once you identify a specific issue, you can begin to resolve it. But you need to have a clear picture of the problem first before you can make any progress.

Most people don’t take the time to break things down far enough to be able to see all the individual aspects clearly. To play anything well requires two fundamental things: to know where you want the fingers to go, and to have the control to get them there. The control part is a given, of course, but you might be surprised how many issues come from a general fuzziness about what the music requires of you.

For instance, you might know what note to play but might not have thought about which finger you use to play it. Or perhaps you had considered the fret hand note but not how to pick or pluck the string. You might know what fingers to place to create a specific chord, but you might not notice how the fingers actually move from one chord to another. The fact is, it’s very easy to have a superficial sense of what you need to do, but completely miss the finer details that ultimately allow you to do it. Breaking things down to their smallest component parts is a powerful way to identify the real issue behind every challenge, and the issue is often NOT that you’re just not good enough.

 

Balance your practice time

Another crucial idea is that your practice time should be balanced. This means that you don’t spend all your time in one area, but divide your efforts so that you work to address several different things over the course of a single session or a single day.

I find that it’s helpful to divide practice time into three categories: technique, vocabulary, and flow:

Technique is the mechanics of playing: how your fingers move. This is the aspect we’ve addressed above in this piece.

Vocabulary is what you play: how many sounds you know how to make, and where they belong in a musical context. Obviously there is a technique component here as well, since every sound is produced by a specific movement or pattern.

Flow is the ability to put the pieces together in real time. This also includes musical elements like dynamics and phrasing as well as the ability to commit music to memory and maintain concentration in a performance.

If you can split your time up so that you address all three areas every time you practice, you’ll probably find your progress starts to accelerate. Of course, all three are interrelated, but working on discrete components helps keep you focused and organized. There are many ways to approach this, but here’s an example of a practice routine that would take about 45 minutes to complete:

1. 5 min – slow warmup on finger exercises.

This is simply to wake your fingers up and start off paying very close attention to how they feel on the guitar neck. Moving slowly ensures accuracy: a sloppy technical exercise does more harm than good, because it teaches you to be sloppy. You don’t need to spend more than five minutes on this kind of detailed work, and make sure that you vary the patterns from day to day.

2. 5-10 min – running scales.

This continues your technique work but places it in a musical context. Keep in mind that even if you never play lead or melody, single-note work makes you a better and more accurate rhythm player by developing overall finger independence and coordination. Focus on finger placement first, but also take the opportunity to do some ear-training: listen to the sounds that different patterns and formations make. Stay aware of your root note, and the sound of each subsequent note as the sequence unfolds.

3. 15-20 min – songs in progress

This might be time devoted to learning a new song, or to polishing up one you’ve been working on. We apply both technique and vocabulary practice in this work, by learning new chords and patterns and by zeroing in on the specific technical demands of each.

4. 15-20 min – performance

This is where you put the microscope away and step back to look at the bigger picture. Whatever song you might be working on, your first large goal should always be to be able to play it all the way through. But that’s still only the first step. Whether you intend to perform or not, you should still perform the songs yourself in practice. This reinforces the flow of the music so you can keep going through mistakes and distractions, and also allows you to play with expressive details like phrasing and dynamics in real time. Remember that the confidence you see in players that are comfortable onstage has to do with their ability to go through all the motions smoothly in real time, and that’s something that requires practice in itself.

The timing of each of these segments is somewhat arbitrary, and you may spend more or less time on each depending on your specific goals. But don’t make the common mistake of disregarding one of these elements because it doesn’t seem relevant to what you do. As I’ve pointed out, playing chords comfortably and easily (not to mention learning new ones) requires the kind of coordination that finger exercises develop. Scale practice serves a similar purpose while also training the ears to follow melody, and training the fingers how to play a sequential pattern on the guitar neck. Song practice develops your sense of structure and dynamics, and prepares you for any kind of performance setting in which you need to be able to play the entire thing through.

 

With a little thought, it shouldn’t be difficult to adapt these ideas and create a practice routine that will help move you towards your playing goals.

If you find it challenging to figure out what to work on, a good teacher will be able to give you the guidance you need. Do keep in mind, though, that ultimately you are responsible for your own improvement. The best teachers will teach you the problem-solving process so that you can continue to do productive work on your own.

Core Concepts 12: build a repertoire and perform it

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There’s no better way to master a piece of music than to perform it.

Practicing alone can only take you so far. Many people find that when they learn a new song, stubborn trouble spots persist even when everything else has become fluid. These might be very obvious things, like a difficult lick or chord form. But they might also be musical factors, the things that make a performance smooth and natural. Either way, the player is left feeling that the song gets to be about 80 percent there and then stops improving.

This is a very common problem, and in fact is a natural part of the learning process. Mastering the song completely requires another step: adding the listener’s ear. That ear might belong to a person, but it could just as easily be a microphone or camera. The simple fact of the performance being documented, or experienced by an audience, changes the player’s awareness. Weaknesses are magnified and stand out more prominently. The natural jitters that most performers feel take their toll on technique as well. The bottom line is, performance is a stress test: how well can you keep it together under challenging circumstances?

The improvements are subtle and don’t happen immediately. If you’re new to performing you will have more frustrating experiences than satisfying ones at first.

But if you continue to do it, you start to become more comfortable. You begin to realize that even an obvious mistake is fleeting, and as long as you can regain your balance most of the audience won’t notice or care. Most of all, you develop the ability to maintain concentration and flow in an unpredictable environment full of distractions. All good musicians need to be able to keep track of multiple things at once, and not all those factors are musical.

Preparing for performance also forces you to zero in on a specific set of music. Without an imperative to perfect particular songs, you’re less likely to push through the work of polishing and refining. It forces you to take a closer look, and work out details that you might not of been aware of or found easy to overlook. Best of all, once that work is done it tends to stick.

Some people just don’t enjoy performing, and it’s certainly possibly to hone a performance without ever stepping on a stage. But for goal-setting, developing flow, and building overall confidence, there’s no better method.

Core Concepts 10: improvise and explore!

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A confident player is unafraid to explore.

People learn to play in two ways. One involves the guidance of a teacher or mentor, who leads the student one step at a time. The other involves exploration and experimentation: try this, try that, and see what happens.

In last week’s Core Concepts we looked at the philosophical split between those who seek out a teacher and those that prefer to find their own way. Where you fall between those two poles will determine how you learn. Ultimately, everyone can and should benefit from both. But the ability to improvise and explore – to let your ears and fingers lead you into new territory – is an essential part of developing true confidence as a player.

 

Watch a child approach an instrument for the first time.

Kids aren’t inhibited by not knowing what to do, because exploration is how they learn about the world. They simply make sounds, and sometimes those sounds begin to develop into something coherent. Some begin to hear relationships and make a connection between an action on the instrument and a particular sound. This is, of course, the skill every player eventually develops, but some take to it more naturally than others.

I’ve come to believe that the thing that stops most adults from just exploring on the guitar has little to do with natural affinity. As we get older and become more accomplished at other things, we get used to knowing what to do. This makes the prospect of blindly jumping in more and more daunting over time. Not knowing where to begin or what choices to make is inhibiting, and creates an “option anxiety” that stops us from trying.

 

The thing is, though, that if you can make one good sound you can make another.

And as you learn to be a conscious listener, you will begin to hear and recognize different sonic relationships. The ability to make these connections is simply based on pattern recognition. Granted, this comes more easily to some than others, but it’s a fundamental aspect of the way our minds order the world. If the patterns are there to be perceived, you can learn to perceive them.

So what’s the value of this kind of exploration? Learning to find your way around the instrument builds confidence and strengthens the connection between hands and ears. For songwriters and composers, it’s essential in order to stimulate creativity and find new patterns to work with. For any player, it opens up the possibility of finding something new every time you pick up the guitar. It’s also highly liberating to feel that if you step off the path you won’t be lost in the wilderness.

Above all, it’s great fun, and a way for anyone to be creative even if you aren’t setting out to write music. It gives you a way to tap into unconscious flow and intuition, once you can comfortably make a good sound. For me, it’s one of the most gratifying aspects of playing music, and there’s nothing like stumbling onto something wonderful you didn’t expect.

So no matter what your goals and interests are, no matter your level of natural ability or skill: pick up your instrument and explore.

It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what’s going to happen: just play.

 

 

 

 

Core Concepts 9: Know the rules, learn from the rulebreakers

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There seems to be a hard philosophical split among musicians when it comes to “learning the rules”.

“Rules” primarily fall into three categories. There are rules of music theory that explain why some notes work well together and some don’t. There are rules of technique – the right and wrong way to play. And then there are stylistic rules: what is and isn’t appropriate within a given genre.

The basic division is on the question of whether or not it’s important to learn “the rules”. Not everyone falls to one side or the other of the divide: as with most such philosophical splits, there’s a continuum. But there are fundamentalists on both sides.

 

1. Music theory

This is an oddly contentious subject, one that people tent to have strong opinions on. On the one hand, there’s the old saw about having to know the rules before you can break them. There are plenty of examples of self-taught musicians “breaking the rules” in very powerful and effective ways without any schooling on what those rules are. However, it’s worth pointing out that some rules matter more than others.

On the other hand, there are creative people that believe any formal knowledge is just a straitjacket. I had a student tell me about a successful songwriter that once told him something to the effect of “I don’t want to know about music, I gotta stay pure”. I applaud this person’s faith in his muse, but it seems needlessly self-limiting.

I think the truth lies somewhere between, as it often does. First of all, many people have a fundamental misunderstanding of what music theory is. The principles of music theory are not like traffic laws that need to be enforced. They are more like an explanation of natural phenomena. Rather than determining which notes are supposed to be used, these “rules” expain WHY certain combinations of notes work well together. Music theory is a system, a set of interconnected relationships. There are principles at work, but they’re far broader than the formulas might suggest.

When something seems to break the rules, it very often doesn’t.

If it sounds good, there is almost certainly a principle in music theory that explains why it works even if the math doesn’t seem to add up. Many naturally intuitive musicians simply hear these relationships, and their musical choices are guided by these principles even if they don’t realize it. For many others, theory gives us a way to classify and categorize the tools in our musical toolbox – something any craftsman can clearly see the value of.

It can be easy to fall into a trap and make the same choices again and again, but I would submit that this trap is more a symptom of creative laziness than any innate shortcoming of understanding music.

 

2. Technique

I don’t believe in “right vs wrong” when it comes to technique. There are great players I’ve admired all my life that use approaches no teacher would be likely to ever recommend. There may be disadvantages to a particular approach, though. There are two things to consider here: one is always a variable, and one isn’t.

For the most part, all humans and all guitars are made more or less the same way. There is a basic mechanical logic to the body, just as there is to the instrument. However, no two people are proportioned exactly alike, and guitars also come in different shapes and sizes. How you ergonomically relate to your instrument depends on the intersection of these two variables.

This directly impacts things like hand position, how high or low to wear a strap, and other mechanical questions. Since all mechanisms work according to the laws of physics, there’s definitely an optimal approach. From the ergonomic perspective, this means maximizing sound while minimizing effort. This makes a lot of sense, and it’s the approach I recommend as a teacher. However, one has to consider the variables: physical differences between people and guitars, and the demands of different musical situations.

Again, I would suggest that the most natural and intuitive players find this optimal approach because it’s the most physically fluid. Those that don’t are often simply distracted by the specifics of playing the notes. They don’t notice the how, only the what. But there’s no denying that sometimes something different just works. If you feel restricted by an approach, you can likely find a better one. If you don’t, as they say, it ain’t broke…

 

3. Style

This is another contentious point for some people. How important is it to be true to a style? Where do we draw the line on what’s appropriate and what isn’t? The answer depends on your goals, and what you’re trying to accomplish.

If your goal is to replicate another player’s style as accurately as possible, the choice is obvious. We might choose to do this simply because we love it, and there’s a lot to be said for getting to know the ins and outs of an artist’s approach. The trap is when it becomes a creative straitjacket. For your average bar band or fan, this may not matter. It’s often more important to sound like the original because that’s what the player and the listener want to hear. But that’s not always the case.

The fact is, all innovation in music has come from people that found their own way of doing things. The history of music is full of artists who forged their own style and changed the sound of everyone who came after them. The great irony for the purist is that they may find themselves imitating and even trying to enforce the approach of a maverick.

 

Ultimately, the idea of “choosing a side” is self-defeating.

What we call “rules” are more often principles and guidelines. They exist because they work, but they aren’t monolithic and there are no penalties for breaking them. Learn the rules, they give you a framework and a path to follow. But you can also learn a lot from individuals that found their own way: don’t be afraid to be yourself.

 

Core Concepts 8: play well with others

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There are lots of good reasons to play music with other people, no matter what your musical goals are.

A significant percentage of people spend most of their time playing alone. Not just in practice time, but playing in general. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but there are musical skills that are only developed by playing in a group. Relating back to last week’s “big ears” post, the ability to listen and react is one of the most important.

There’s a big difference between practicing a part by yourself and playing it as part of a group. Playing along with a backing track can be a good first step in learning to fit in and blend, but a track never changes. After some repetition, you know exactly what to expect. But in a live setting with other players, even solidly consistent performances have variations. Playing with other humans forces you to tune in at a more detailed and dynamic level, even if the parts never change.

 

One of the highest goals for the aspiring musician is to be able to play with intent in the moment.

The part might be thoroughly practiced and planned in advance, but in performance it still has to be executed musically and dynamically. There’s no better way to develop that intention by reacting consciously to other players.

Maybe most important of all, though, playing music is one of the best things people can do together as a group. When a performance is at its best, it’s a collective experience shared by everyone, a way to wordlessly communicate and share an emotional connection.