Guitar chords left hand position. We're going to talk about how to position your left hand
and your fingers to get the best sounding guitar chords possible. Let's do this.
Hi I'm Tomas from Real Guitar Success. If you're into uplifting guitar lessons
and real guitar learning advice, subscribe to my channel. Getting
the correct left hand position on the guitar can be a bit elusive.
I'm going to show you exactly what you need to know to play beautiful sounding guitar chords.
So let's start with the thumb position. I'm going to put my thumb behind the neck. It's okay if it
sticks up a little bit but you don't want to have it sitting way up here behind the neck. And
roughly when I put my fingers on the strings the thumb is going to be roughly in the middle of the
fingers. Now there's two main reasons for this. One is flexibility. If your thumb is up here,
you'll see that you can't really stretch your fingers out but when your thumb is back here,
I've got much more stretch and that will come in handy and the other reason is strength. You see,
when the thumb is behind the neck what is happening is my fingers are pressing
directly into the thumb. I'll show you later how the fingers you want to
keep them more on their fingertips. But if your thumb is up higher around the neck
you can see what happens is without the guitar neck my finger is going
into more the middle of my thumb and that's a much weaker position. Try it. Try it with me
and see how that feels. It's much weaker. The end result is you have to press a lot harder and use
a lot more tension if your thumb is in the wrong place. Let's take a peek behind the guitar neck.
Now a good basic thumb position should look like this.
My thumb is roughly in the middle of my fingers but not exactly and that's not critical.
Now sometimes it is appropriate to wrap your thumb around when you're playing electric guitar, when
you're bending strings and sometimes you don't use your thumb for a bass note but that's not so much
what we're talking about here. Basic technique of the thumb should be behind. Now it might feel
a little awkward at first but you will get used to it and it will pay dividends in the future.
One of the things you want to watch for is that you don't want to crick your thumb or
bend the knuckle like this. And also it's okay to move your thumb over to the side a little
like this but you don't want to play like this. This really ruins the leverage that you have.
Okay now let's talk about the fingers. First off, you want to keep your fingers close to the frets
that's these little metal pieces on the guitar fretboard.
If your finger is too far back you're going to get buzzing very easily
because it's not making good contact with the fret. And if your finger's right on top
of the fret, you'll find that it deadens out the string because of the flesh that's leaning over
kinda dampens the string. You're going to get your best sound when you move just behind the
fret like that. When I say behind, I mean that way. (strumming) Aah, that's a pretty good sound.
When you're making chords, you're going to need to use your fingertips
otherwise you're going to have a heck of a time with hitting other strings. For each chord,
you'll need to kinda find just that right part of the tip of the finger that works best. It's
a little different for different chords. But generally speaking, if you do flatten out your
finger you're going to hit other strings. It'll also take more strength and make you tired faster.
To get the fingertip on the string, you're going to angle your fingers up and down. Now
you can do it more or less depending on the chord. So you'll see for a D chord,
I can angle them a lot. But for a G chord because I have to stretch across the neck
not as much. What you're going for is the best that you can based on the chord and which string
you're trying to get to. Sometimes you'll find it helps to angle the fingers a little bit this way.
Keep in mind that just a little bit is what I'm talking about not something like this especially
if your elbow starts sticking out. You'll see with an A chord I do need to angle my
fingers a little bit because it's the only way I can get all three fingers into those spaces.
Now to get the right angle with the fingers, you're going to leave a little space between your
hand and the fretboard. Think of it like this, if you had a golf ball in your hand you could kind of
feel the amount of space that you need then take that space and put the guitar neck right in there.
You see, I'm not flattening out my fingers that would crunch the golf ball or actually it would
hurt my hand because I couldn't crunch the golf ball and also you don't want too much space
between your hand and the neck because that causes the difficulty with stretching your fingers over
or you'd have to angle your wrists out too much. Let your wrist relax. So the idea is if you just
put enough tension on the guitar your hand is held up but if you release this light your hand
would just fall down so you're not pushing it out this way or pulling it back. So your wrist
should be relaxed and if I let go it'll just fall straight to the floor. Staying relaxed as
you finger cords is important. It keeps you from getting tired too quickly but also if you press
too hard on the chord to get the sound when you try to switch to another chord it'll be hard and
take longer and remember it shouldn't be painful. If it is, you need to back off and see what you're
doing and try to make a little adjustment. You can always try this experiment. Make the chord,
get it to sound right and then release a little and see if your hand just relaxes.
To do that, I do keep my elbow tucked into my side but not forcefully tucked in just kind of
gently tucked in or another way to think about it is not letting my elbow stick out like this.
I want to demonstrate a few chords now to show you some of the variations on
the finger and thumb position. Let's start with a G chord. I'll
make a three finger G and you'll notice I have my fingers close to the frets but not on top.
My thumb is pretty much behind the guitar neck. On the G chord, it's back more than
some of the other chords. If I switch my fingers around and make a G with my pinky,
I actually can get my thumb up a little bit higher and it feels secure. But you notice you can see
the tip of my thumb, it is roughly in the middle of the chord. My wrist is relaxed. If I let go,
it'll just drop straight to the floor not angled out like this which I see a lot of beginners do.
Watch it. You don't raise your elbow up. Leave it relaxed at your side.
Now here's a folk style C chord and my thumb is back here again.
It's behind the neck. I don't think you can see it. Um,
I can raise it up a little and still works but I have more leverage right here.
Notice how angled my fingers are. They're coming up and down on the string that makes it so I’m
clearing the different strings not hitting them accidentally. I can get all the strings to ring.
And then the D chord. You'll notice the D has the most angle. My fingers are really scrunched
together. I could stretch out more like this but now this is going to hurt my wrist over time and
i don't want to do that. Nice and relaxed. Again. I'm not forcing my wrist out or pulling it back
just nice and relaxed. See. It can just fall off if I let go of the pressure.
Yeah, well that's it for now. I really hope this video helped you out.
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