Microshifting

Technique
1

I have large hands, but micro-shifting is much easier and quicker. Should I be focusing on my hand posture/ fingering posture now or should I continue micro-shifting until I am better at playing? This is an established bad habit and I am wondering if I should break it now or later. jjswenson

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2

My personal opinion is that as long as you train finger independence micro shifting is perfectly viable and not a bad habit or roadblock later on. If you microshift and ignore the pinky and ring even if you should fret it with those fingers - I think that’s a bad habit. Not microshifting with the correct fingering.

In my experience when I tried to “overstretch” my hand revolted the next day. It was painful and to a degree things are uncomfortable when first learning it, but I overdid it with stretching so now I do what’s comfortable and the stretch range increased without focusing any training on it and keeping my hand nice and healthy :slight_smile:

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3

Good advice. My large hands won’t one finger per fret, and I have finally decided to just play, and stop obsessing over it. There are more important objectives. Further up the fret board I’ll do 1FPF.

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4

IMO, both fingering techique (1FPF) and microshifting are worthy things to practice. Since you have large hands, do some stretching exercises with your fingers and get them accustomed to spreading out. You may not be able to span 4 frets in the beginning, but perhaps you can in the future after hours of practice and conditioning.
I have medium size hands and spread my fingers out as much as I can, but also do a lot of microshifting.

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5

Josh did his latest video on ways to do your fretting. Check out this thread and the video, it would probably answer some questions for you.

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6

I agree with this @jjswenson! Shifting isn’t a “bad habit”, it just takes some strain off your stretching. So if you want to get better at stretching, put some more stress on your stretch-skills, and you’ll see improvement, but it’s not like you then have to stop microshifting forever. :slight_smile:

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7

I can’t even imagine playing without microshifting.

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