Eliminating the Top 6 Guitar Technique Mistakes Holding You Back
Developing solid guitar technique establishes the foundation enabling you to clearly articulate musical ideas fluidly. However, inefficient mechanical habits can obstruct progress in chasing your aspirations, regardless of genre or style.
Through years of honing my own playing and instructing passionate students, I’ve witnessed the same limiting technical pitfalls frequently arise that sabotage advancement if left unaddressed.
Let’s talk about guitar technique! I’d like to discuss the top 6 worst guitar technique mistakes that I’ve encountered both with my own playing and with my students so far. Eliminating those roadblocks will greatly help you out on your guitar journey.
In today’s lesson, I’d like to show you some very effective exercises that will help you with overcoming them as fast as possible.
Mistake #1: Not Using Your Thumb Correctly
The thumb constitutes the cornerstone stabilizing your entire fretting hand framework, enabling fingers to leverage its sturdy foundational support articulating notes clearly. Without proper thumb positioning, unusual tension manifests destabilizing delicate motor coordination.
In beginners, poor habit instills attempting to fret notes entirely without any thumb assistance as I demonstrate – an immense unnecessary challenge making everything exponentially more difficult.
Even in intermediate players, issues arise placing too much emphasis on keeping the thumb “locked” rigidly behind the neck rather than allowing some flexibility. This limits warmer, vocal sonic expressions experimenting between positions.
As I’m quite sure you know already, your hands are built to grab things and your thumb is the most important tool for that. It gives you optimal support for your left-hand fingers when it comes to guitar playing. Amongst many other things, it will help you with building a very efficient legato technique for example.
Practice slowly, consciousness of thumb shaping fret hand posture for optimal support then relaxation enabling nuanced articulations like string bends. Stay aware of avoiding overexertion but leverage stability gaining confidence.
Mistake #2: Not Unlocking Your Wrist
This is obviously all about picking technique and it was one of my personal biggest roadblocks. If you’re working with your entire arm when you’re picking and you completely lock up your wrist, you will encounter multiple problems.
You will have issues with mastering clean string transitions. You won’t really be able to feel the individual notes that you’re playing or the subdivisions when things get faster. And of course, it will also be close to impossible to work with interesting dynamics if this is your default motion.
It might feel like a shortcut to faster tempos in the beginning because it’s easier to gain momentum when you rely on brute force. But it sounds quite terrible.
I obviously got much better and more controlled results as soon as I started working with my wrist for slower tempos and with a mix of my arm and wrist for the really fast and crazy stuff. But I never lock up my wrist completely and use a full arm motion like that.
I don’t think that will get you the results you’re looking for. In case you still have some work to do unlocking and using your wrist for faster tempos, I have a really cool rhythmic exercise for you to develop flexibility and control.
Mistake #3: Extreme Hand Angles
This is also something I personally struggled with for quite a long time. It actually took a while for me to realize that it’s difficult for me to stretch because of the way I’m angling my hands when I’m playing – and not because of the size of my hands or fingers.
I’m talking about really extreme angles. A lot of my students complained that their fingers are not long enough or that their hands are not big enough to make certain stretches and play certain shapes. And it turned out that it was their technique and those extreme angles that prevented them from covering more ground on the fretboard.
When I was playing the classic 2 note per string pentatonic shape, my hand always looked awkward and that made it impossible for me to stretch farther than a few frets. In order to extend this shape, I would have to stretch very far. But by positioning my hand correctly, it’s easy to do now.
Mistake #4: Flat Fingers
The next topic concerns your left-hand finger positioning. First of all, you want to position your finger in the area around each fret to make the notes ring out nicely. But what might be more important is the angle in which your finger contacts the string and fretboard.
A huge progress killer is what I like to call “flat fingers”. If your fingers are not curled, they might block the next string. And of course that will make it impossible to play really interesting chord shapes because you’re constantly blocking strings with your fingers.
Amongst many other topics, you also won’t be able to develop an efficient hammer-on and pull-off motion because you need that nice snapping motion to do it effectively. So working with taps and legato techniques won’t work with flat fingers.
Mistake #5: One-Dimensional Vibrato and Bends
Now let’s talk about one of the biggest cliches when it comes to technical players: emotion and feel in the form of vibrato and string bending. Of course, it’s important to focus on hitting the right pitches with your string-bending licks. And it’s a very common stereotype that technical fast players can’t do that because they don’t work on it.
So please help me prove that stereotype wrong by including this in your practice routine. A simple exercise is playing the two pitches individually before bending. That way you can check easily if you’re hitting the correct notes. It also helps to practice with a backing track so you immediately hear if you’re out of tune.
The same goes for vibrato – it’s common to see excessive, barely audible, or no dynamic vibrato. And that makes it impossible to properly articulate your playing to the music by using dynamics. So please focus on string bending and adding some stylistic flair to your vibrato as well.
Mistake #6: Lack of Hand Synchronization
Now onto the last topic – probably one of the most important ones: hand synchronization. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s all about syncing up every picking stroke of your right hand with the correct notes your left hand is playing.
To give a bad example – it’s very common to see stuff like this, where I’m picking fast and trying to match my left hand, but playing random notes hoping that it aligns somehow. This might fool an inexperienced listener, but you won’t get away with it forever.
I learned that the hard way early on when the drummer called me out for not really playing any rhythmic note values and not locking in with the band at all. I was just going as fast as I could. Now there’s nothing more satisfying for me than hearing perfectly synchronized hands when it comes to fast licks – and when the note spacing is also accurate.
So in case you want to work on your synchronization skills, here is the perfect exercise for that.
I hope checking out these common technique mistakes was helpful! Remember to download all the tab and practice material for these lessons at my Patreon page. And let me know if you have any other questions!
