How To Stop Looking At Your Fretting Hand

Are you learning to play the guitar but you're having trouble with not looking at your hand and the fretboard and you feel like you're doing this between the strumming hand and then your music and you're doing this and that. And I see this with students all the time. They're trying to learn a song and then they're putting their chord down, they're doing their strumming pattern and then they're looking back at their music. And there's all this back and forth in the beginning because you haven't developed the muscle memory yet to memorize all this stuff. So what I'm going to share with you in this video is some tips to help you. One, develop that muscle memory so that you don't need to look at your hand all the time. And two, what you can do to really train for this. So the first thing we are going to talk about is little finger push ups.

So what we're going to talk about first is the process of just learning the chord. Okay? That's the first thing you have to learn the chord. And for a lot of my students in my seven level guitar system, I show people how to learn easy chords in the beginning. And we focus on pivot points, okay? Because having a pivot point and a chord makes it easier to change between two chords. So say you take a chord like E minor, okay. And I play my E minor chord with my first and second fingers. You could play it with your second and third as well. Sound wise, it doesn't make a difference. But if you use your first and second fingers, it creates a pivot point to an easy C chord. Okay? So now I only have to move one finger so opposed to two fingers. So that's step one is learning the actual chord. So I'm gonna learn my E minor chord and if you're one of my students, you're gonna learn the easy C chord, okay? You're gonna learn E minor, easy C, okay? And then what we're gonna do is we're just gonna practice going back and forth between these two chords. And what I want you to do is put your sight on it first. Okay? Now don't worry too much about guitar sounding perfect. At this point. We more just want to work on the movement of the fingers, okay? And this is, we do a lot of this in my seven level guitar system. We focus a lot on hand dexterity because a big part of the the problem and the learning of guitar is just getting those hands to move fast enough. So these pivot points help. So now I'm going to watch my E minor chord. I'm going to watch going to C, just moving that one finger. And if you know a three fingered C chord, go right ahead. You still have a pivot point. Now you're just rotating the second finger, this one's not moving. Okay. From that string, you're just rotating into a three finger chord. But I will tell you, it is much easier to move one finger than it is to move two fingers at a time. Okay? So that's the starting point. So our E minor C, E minor C. And I would do this 10 or 12 times. And then what I would do is I would take my hands away and be like, okay, can I go from E minor to C? Now the first time you might hit the wrong string and you'll know if you're wrong because it's just gonna sound horrible. Okay? But you're gonna go, okay, E minor C, E minor C. And maybe you get it right a couple times and then you mess it up. Fine, stop. Go back to the E minor chord and start watching your guitar. Put the visual back on it again. Okay, so E minor C, E minor C. Okay, do that a dozen or so times and then you're like, great, okay, I'm watching. And now I'm gonna take my handle my eyes off of it and see if I can keep the chord change going. And it doesn't have to be that fast. You might not be playing that fast. It can be very slow. This is not a speed drill. This is a muscle memory drill. Okay? So that's step one is just learn your chords. Even if it's a chord change without a pivot point. Because I know a lot of people are like, lauren, I hate going from a C chord to a G chord. There is no pivot point between a C major chord and a G major chord. So you're going to have to watch those chords. Okay. Slowly change them and then you're going to take your eyes off of them. Okay? Now a lot of beginner students don't quite have the muscle memory of the chords in their fingers yet. So for me, I can make a C chord in the air. I can make a G chord, E minor, A chord. I can do all these things with my fingers in the air, okay? Because my hands have done it tens of thousands of times. They know where those chords are, they know where the strings are, they know the distance. I don't need the guitar. So to. To play a C chord in the air, okay? So if I Just put that there. It's there. So I'm going to show you a little exercise you can do to build up to this point. All right? So step number one, we have to learn the chords. Okay? And. And don't learn dozens of chords at the same time. A lot of students make that mistake. They learn too many chords at the same time. The four chords I recommend you learn first are C, E minor, D and G. And if you're in my seven level system, you'll learn the four easy chords that have the pivot points to make it a little bit easier for you in the beginning. So this is something I teach my students in the course. They're called finger push ups. Okay. And what we want to do is we just want to build muscle memory. So let's take a G chord. Okay, So I have my three finger G chord here. I use my third finger. If you use your pinky, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't change the sound. It's just my hand's more comfortable using the third finger. Okay, so I got a G chord here. So I'm on the close up camera. My goal, I don't know if you can see it. I'm barely. And turn sideways here, lifting my fingers off the fretboard. So all I'm doing here is it's literally maybe like an eighth of an inch or a few millimeters, you know, if you're in the metric system. And I'm lightly just releasing the fingers above the strings and putting them right back on. Okay, now, very, very tiny little bit. Now for some of you, again, you don't have the muscle memory yet. As soon as you take your fingers off the strings, they're going to flatten out. If you're doing something like a C chord, they're probably going to flatten out right away. And the goal is we're going to try and work on getting these fingers to not move as much. All right? And once they start holding, put a little bit, you start going a little bit wider. So now about, you know, maybe a quarter inch, a centimeter off the guitar. Okay. Now I'm like an inch off the guitar and I'm just pressing into the strings, tapping them very lightly. Okay. And then I'm going to peel my fingers. So you see, I keep coming further and further from the fretboard. And you can see here, you know, my G chord, I do tend to put my first, my third finger down first. Okay. So if you have to build your chords, you're a beginner and you're still building them one finger at a time. That's okay. As long as we're getting them on the right strings and in the right frets, totally fine. Okay. And the last step is to drop your hand, bring your hand up, make the cord. Okay. So eventually when you get to this stage, if I can drop my hand to my side, lift it up and put it on the fretboard, then you will know that you know those chords and you won't need to look at your fretting hand anymore. And I highly encourage students. When students were playing songs, they didn't trust me that they, their hand knew what they were doing. Okay. I can tell when someone's starting to develop muscle memory. So what I used to do. I'll take my notes here. If someone was playing a song and I used to cover their fretting hand, and at first they would freak out and they'd be like, what are you doing? And I'm like, I want you to start trusting your brain and trusting your fretting hands. So at some point, you're going to have to start practicing your chord changes without looking at the guitar. And are you going to make mistakes? Yes. Are your chord changes going to slow down a little bit? Absolutely, they are going to slow down, but sometimes you have to go a little bit backwards to go forwards. Because once you get muscle memory down, once you get that muscle memory down, you are going to be able to do these chord changes so much faster than you can looking at them. Because now we're taking the visual component out. Now what you can do is now you can focus on the music in front of you instead of, you know, doing. Doing the three, the three point turn here, looking at the music you're strumming and your fretting hand. Or maybe now you don't have to watch your fretting hand. Now you're going to focus on your strumming hand and work on developing your strumming hand more. Now, if you're someone that's interested in learning more about strumming and developing your strumming hand, I highly recommend you go watch this video over here. I'm going to show you the number one strumming pattern that you should learn and how you can turn it into multiple different strumming patterns and sound really cool. Go watch that video right over there.