Mastering Right Hand Technique: Right Hand Position and Movement
This video is from my online technique course, Basic Classical Guitar Mastery.
Video Number Four introduces to all of the most basic, important points about how, where and why classical guitarists position our right hands as we do. This is an excerpt of a longer video in which I give further pointers about the angle of the famous “x” between the thumb and fingers, as well as how it shifts based on the straightness/curvedness of your wrist. This is an excerpt from Video 2 of 12 info-packed, highly demonstrative videos in Module 3, Mastering Right Hand Technique
The course is over 40 videos long, It’s designed to rebuild and refine your basic technique from the ground up. If you’re a beginner, then much of the material will serve to set you up on the right track. It clearly demonstrates and explains the all of the concepts most important to playing well. The more advanced videos and concepts will continue to help you over time as you get better and better.
For more intermediate players, this course could still be helpful. Many fairly good players have certain blind spots with hold them back. In my experience insufficiently mastered technical basics account for so many of the mistakes classical guitar students make. Improving your mastery of the basics, and knowing how to practice and hone the them—and identifying when you need to do this–are prerequisites for solving more advanced technical challenges. This course walks you through this in detail.
How and why did I make this series?
I originally started making these videos as supplementary material for a rather ambitious book project, Conquering Technical Hurdles. That book grew a bit out of hand and I plan on finishing when the circumstances are right. Much of the research into both classical guitar technique and the science of learning and mastery got poured into the principles I emphasize in these videos. So the videos are meant to supplement the book’s more complete goal, which is to provide my detailed blueprint for how to move all of your playing from survival to mastery, whether it’s one specific technique or your overall technique, one piece of repertoire, or your overall ability to learn repertoire.
The book and the video course are also the result of a process I was going through, in which I had to revisit my own technique out of necessity,and learn a more holistic and embodied approach to playing. This was due to a some health challenges that interrupted my career, all of them connected to my having type 1 diabetes for nearly 4 decades: These were a serious back injury after a seizure, and a series of hand operations for trigger finger, which is a frequent complication among long-time diabetics.
These never completely stopped me from playing but they hampered my ability to play advanced repertoire, and put my career as a performer on hiatus.
Now I’m playing better than ever and this is in many ways the direct result of my using some of the hard-discovered principles which I share in these videos.
Jay
