Little Stretching Advice

Hi,

Just wondered if anyone can offer some sage advice as to improving my ability to stretch between the first and second finger of my left hand. I'm playing a tenor uke (as you can see by my sig), and I often have the need to stretch between my first and second finger and also fret a note with my pinkie. What seems to happen is that I will inadvertently flex my wrist (as if trying to "curl" the neck of the uke with my wrist) to reach the chord, and when I notice this I straighten my wrist back to minimal flexion (as it's supposed to be). This tends to make things easier, but I find that my slight limitation in stretching between 1 and 2 sometimes causes one or both of those fingers to be misaligned with the frets when I fret the pinkie note, and I get some muting and what I call the "thunks". Shifting the second finger tends to shift the first, if you know what I mean, so I need to improve the stretch between them.

Any good exercises that you've found to work on this? I am using hand -exercise putty as a matter of course to strengthen my fingers for barre chords and to strengthen the adductors of the fingers....and of course I play as much as possible and practice stretching and spiders.

Thanks!

K

Hi! I'm in a similar boat, transitioning from the soprano to the tenor. There are a couple of old threads about stretching that you can find by searching, and Aldrine has a Uke Minutes stretching exercise here that can definitely help: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ep7w-KnN5OM ...but I imagine that these are not terribly different than the things you're trying already.


From your description, I can't help but wonder if your problem isn't ONLY related to stretching, but also comfort holding the instrument while playing. Have you tried tilting the neck upward, like a classical guitar? I've found that this has helped me to improve my left hand technique on the tenor, though it's taking a bit of practice.

One more suggestion that has helped me a lot-- "chord practice", as recommended on Justinguitar.com (which is an amazing site for guitars, but also has lots of info that ukulele players can use, too). In a nutshell,
1. spend maybe five minutes of your practice time focusing on your hardest chords by fretting them and strumming, then picking out the individual notes in the chord and getting them really clear and beautiful, then strumming again. Build the muscle memory for those great sounding chords.
2. Spend five minutes of your practice time doing timed chord changes-- play two chords, and see how many switches between those chords you can make in a minute. Here you might choose a chord for which you have great left hand technique, and a difficult chord that requires the stretched hand position that's giving you so much trouble.

Good luck!

Good answer~ glad Stephanie could help!