Lauren Bateman shows two thumb positions for guitar: flat on the back of the neck for beginners, which gives better wrist alignment and reach, versus over the top once your hand gets flexible, which lets you mute strings and play bass notes.
Now, there's a couple different approaches you can take when playing guitar and using your thumb. So there's usually a place where I start students when they're just getting started on the guitar. And as their hand stretches out and gets more flexible, there's another option I show them, which is probably what you guys see me do in my guitar lesson.
So the first option I tell students when we're just starting to learn guitar is to have your thumb straight up and down like this. And we're going to put it on the back of the guitar, okay? Just flat on the back of the guitar, usually in the middle of the fretboard. Now, if you have an electric guitar, there's usually a piece of rosewood that goes along the middle. That's your thumb line. You can use that to gauge where you're going to put your thumb on the back of the guitar. Now, why do I recommend this for beginners? The reason I tell beginners to do this is because if you put your thumb up here, it kills a lot of the reach on your wrist. Watch, I'm going to turn sideways. Here's me making a C chord. And a C chord tends to be very hard for a lot of students. They tend to mute a lot of the strings because oftentimes they're playing the C chord like this. And look what happens to my wrist. See this? We get like this waiter pose. Okay? I don't want the waiter pose. We want our wrists to be relaxed and neutral. So I always tell students, lower your hand to the ground and then reach it up to the guitar. Now look what happens when my thumb comes up to my wrist. We get again that waiter pose. And that's going to put a lot of tension, your wrist. Now, in the beginning, students don't tend to have a lot of flexibility, a lot of strength. So putting your fingers here is a great start until your fingers stretch out. Now, the downside to doing this, there's trade offs to everything, even in guitar. The downside to doing this is for something like a C chord or a D chord or a minor, any one of those five string chords is that oftentimes when you're strumming, you're going to hit this top string. Now, if you're playing an acoustic guitar, acoustic guitars are way more forgiving than electric guitars if you did that. But this is when you start breaking the rule of thumb. Here is as your hand gets more flexible, you'll notice when I play a C chord, I play it with my thumb over the top. So let me Turn to the side real quick. So you see here, here's my thumb. Here's my thumb. Okay? This is what I'm doing. I'm not doing this. So most beginners, when they try doing this technique, this, this is what happens to the wrists. They get, they tweak their wrist. Even when you're doing this thumb over the top technique, you still want your wrists to be neutral or you're going to injure your wrist. So this is why I don't usually teach this technique to beginners right from the get go. But the benefit now of doing this is I can mute my top string. And when I play a C chord, I can actually strum all six strings.
And it'll sound good without me having to worry that the top string is going to come through and kind of muddy things up a bit. Same for the A minor. Okay. D chord, same thing. Okay. Anything that is not six chords, I usually have my thumb up the top. Now, another benefit to doing the thumb up the top technique is, you know, I sometimes like to use my thumb to play bass notes. So say we had a D, F sharp chord for a song like Zomb.
So you notice, I don't know if you saw, when I went to the C chord, my thumb came up, I muted that top string, and then when I went from the G chord to this D F sharp, I actually reached my thumb over. I'm playing that F sharp note in the bass with my thumb, and I'm also muting the fifth string. So now I can strum the entire guitar and I don't have to worry about if I'm hitting the right or the wrong strings. If you guys are looking for a great exercise for really working on the flexibility and dexterity of your fingers and getting this hand stretching out much faster, go check out this exercise over here for how to get faster fingers in just one week.
