Right and left hand on classical guitar
07 December 2024
Meanwhile, years pass, the guitarist has already learned something and now he begins to encounter such techniques as: a) tremolo, b) arpeggio and c) fast passage technique. And he wants to play well, but something gets in the way. And who would have thought that it would be the right hand that would interfere, i.e. hinder good speed, evenness and clarity of the above three techniques, not the left hand.
That’s it, here we go!
All my life I sweated over my left hand and it was the one that got tired, and it was the one that needed to be developed, stretched, liberated, establish new neural connections, develop motor skills, etc., and then bam, it turns out that all the problems and barriers are from the stiffness, immobility and roughness of the right hand. Playing something average and mediocre, where you just pluck different notes, like a calmly grazing goat plucks grass in a ravine or a meadow – this is not difficult. But playing passages at crazy speed, light, smooth and fast tremolo and arpeggio – this is already a task far from simple and its difficulty is based on the weakness of the right hand. You will never be able to tear the whole hall apart with a frantic speed of passages, crazy virtuosity, or just play a beautiful tremolo and smooth arpeggio even at not the most cosmic speeds, having a weak right hand.
Let’s sum it up.
The right hand is of the utmost importance during the first few lessons, because, firstly, the training itself should begin with it, and secondly, it has many different parameters (angle of the hand, distance of the fingers from the deck, sound extraction, tilt of the hand, apoyando of the thumb, etc.) in comparison with the left hand, where these parameters are practically absent. However, later, after the first lessons, you can forget about the right hand, leaving in memory only the alternation of fingers, because bringing this to complete automatism (so that there are no repetitions of the same finger) is a task and process that takes more than one year. The rest of the time of guitar training is fiddling with the left hand. And only at a high level, as a rule, the level of a music school and conservatory, we are faced with the fact that it is the right hand that slows down our development and it is precisely it that the question of the speed and ease of your passages rests on (although here the left hand also bears a significant load), tremolo and arpeggio. Therefore, at first a couple of lessons – the right. Then the long initial and middle periods are left. And the peak is right.
The right hand is of the utmost importance during the first few lessons, because, firstly, the training itself should begin with it, and secondly, it has many different parameters (angle of the hand, distance of the fingers from the deck, sound extraction, tilt of the hand, apoyando of the thumb, etc.) in comparison with the left hand, where these parameters are practically absent. However, later, after the first lessons, you can forget about the right hand, leaving in memory only the alternation of fingers, because bringing this to complete automatism (so that there are no repetitions of the same finger) is a task and process that takes more than one year. The rest of the time of guitar training is fiddling with the left hand. And only at a high level, as a rule, the level of a music school and conservatory, we are faced with the fact that it is the right hand that slows down our development and it is precisely it that the question of the speed and ease of your passages rests on (although here the left hand also bears a significant load), tremolo and arpeggio. Therefore, at first a couple of lessons – the right. Then the long initial and middle periods are left. And the peak is right.