Anyone else have a habit of fretting and gripping way too hard with your fretting hand thumb, especially when playing fast?
It is a bad habit I have developed and it is turning in to an actual problem. I’m starting to get some mild wrist pain from it. And while this is a good excuse to stop what I was doing, and chill and practice muted slap and pop technique for a while, I want to fix it before I give myself an RSI or something.
One thing I have read online is to devote part of practice time to playing without using the thumb on the neck at all. I have tried that and it seems good. It’s not totally breaking the habit though. One guy claimed he actually taped his thumb to the side of his hand for a while to practice. I might have to try that.
I am also thinking seriously about springing for a lesson locally to have an instructor look at my overall left hand form, but for this problem I am a little afraid that the instructor I get would be a very by-the-book perfect form type (common here) who would just focus on the technically perfect hand position and not the most ergonomic, which is kind of the opposite of what I want. Still, this seems like a good option.
I would definitely recommend consulting with an experienced teacher (that is one of the things that just doesn’t work as well online, or perhaps not at all…), but finding the right one can be quite challenging.
And by “right” I don’t mean one that basically says what you want to hear, but also not one who wants to beat textbook stuff into you at any cost. Instead, the best teacher is someone who recognizes your individual “challenges” (anatomically, conceptually, …), makes you aware of them, and develops solutions for you and with you. Alas, these guys are hard to find…
Thanks! Yeah, I’ll probably ask around for instructor recommendations. There’s an amazing range of instruction available here, so finding one shouldn’t be too tough, just might take a few tries. I found a couple that do free trial lessons too, but usually those are big schools and probably random instructors.
Howard - I’m guilty of too much force, strain, and exertion on both hands. It has lead to rough problems in the muscle and the hands.
Please oh please - breath lots.
Relax lots.
Turn the amp up, and play softer.
There’s a sweet spot that you can find where you are putting in the perfect amount of energy to get the perfect sound. Try and find that, and relax into it.
I still don’t do it - particularly if I get a bass solo. I an excitable boy. But! It’s a goal, and I still work towards it.
Turning up the amp is great advice! Breathing and relaxing too.
Practicing adequately amplified is so important. I wasn’t doing it for a long time as I tend to practice late at night and that might have contributed.
I think everybody (who will admit it) sometimes uses more force to play bass than is needed, including me.
What I’ve been doing for myself is at the beginner of most practice sessions, I start with some technical warm up stuff, and I’ll intermittently start using way way less pressure than I need, so the notes don’t actually come up, and then I slowly add tiny bits more pressure until I get notes again. Then I can find where the threshold really is and get used to that feeling for the rest of my practice session.
After a few months of focusing on that again, I feel like I’m consistently playing easier with my fretting hand, and I’m remembering to adjust that during rehearsals/gigs too, so it’s working well for me.
Slower songs with easy Bass parts are not usually an issue but as they get faster and/or more technical I find myself squeezing the neck too. Sadly I’m aware of it, will relax my hand and the next thing I know I’m back to squeezing before the song is done.
I’m with you @Gadget. I love putting on my experienced teacher hat and asking people to relax and breathe… but, damn it, at a show last weekend I got super amped up. When I get excited my whole body tenses. Adrenaline + my brain’s instinctual shouting “you’re trying to do a cool thing! Use muscles!!” = my muscles tighten up, everything feels like it’s in slow motion; clunky; not good.
So. I’m with you on this 100%.
Best thing to do is just dedicate practice time to relaxing and playing. Whatever the phrase or the situation is where you feel the tension, try and isolate it and play it. Let the brain and body get comfortable with the scenario so they’re not activating ‘fight-or-flight’ channels in the bio mechanics.
And then, like me, you’ll still have to deal with lapses.
Steady on, steady on, steady on.
(he said to himself…)
@JoshFossgreen@Gio I know this is an old thread, but I’ve been developing some wrist pain myself - I believe from crazy wrist angles and pressing too hard/at weird angles. When I try to do the proper left hand position as you mention in your early videos I can’t seem to find any way to not end up with a crazy wrist angle (I’ve experimented with different bass heights and angles, but nothing really works).
On another thread, @howard posted this video on another way of thinking about left hand position:
I was wondering if you have seen this and have any opinions on it. In some initial experimenting, it seems to immediately eliminate the pain for me, but it does make certain things much harder to play, especially on the E string.
Yes! That is a great video, Adam should do more stuff about technique. I’d like to incorporate more of his ideas into future course improvements.
I +1 pretty much everything Adam says in the video - don’t try to force the parallel-to-the-frets on the lower frets, especially if you have a small body. I could have been more clear about that in B2B, for sure.
And also, short scale basses aren’t against the law! Might be worth a try if you can’t find a better wrist angle on those low frets.
As it happens I actually do have a Cordoba mini acoustic bass, which I used for most of the B2B course. The body gets in the way of the high frets, but other than that it’s been great. I picked up a full size “The Bass Company” bass from a family member recently and started trying to force the stretch. Naturally forcing anything becomes a problem eventually, but now I know better! I also just took the full size in to a local store to get set-up, so that should help too I bet.
I’ve just tried this no-thumb-on-neck thing (trying to reduce the pressure on my left thumb), but not sure if I’m doing it correctly.
Without the left thumb giving support to the neck and my fretting fingers, most of the pull is now generated by my left shoulder, and my fretting fingers are just hanging on to the neck (like doing a fingertip pull-up). This pull on the neck is then counterbalanced by my right wrist pulling on the body, with the pull coming from the right shoulder. So overall it feels as if I am trying to wrap the bass around my torso like a towel.
Am I going in the right direction here, or am I just giving myself a shoulder workout?
@akos just out of curiousity, are you experiencing “neck dive” with your bass? If you are, this would cause subconscious gripping of the neck to counter the neck dive. Just a thought
