TE-004 • Minimum Movement

[justinguitar]

Questions...

[saw7988]

Hello,

I've been playing for almost a year now, but I've noticed I have the "fly off fingers" or whatever you called it so I started doing this exercise. My main question is when you are progressing through this exercise day to day, are you supposed to try to get faster at the pos. 1 G Major scale while doing minimum movement or just keep the speed at that very slow speed (you said like a note / few seconds) and have the main focus be on completely minimum movements? I've been doing the exercise for maybe 3-5 days or something like that... and it feels like it's getting on the easy side at the really slow speed (haven't really tried speeding it up at all), but when I play fast my fingers still fly off.

Thanks for your help.

[saw7988]

Ok, maybe my post was a little wordy??

I'm really just inquiring about how one progresses through this exercise. For the spider you try to get faster and do it at higher BPMs...

Do I want to be getting faster or just keep it really slow and have it get easier?

[Quark]

Saw, if I am reading your question correctly,  the goal is to use the minimum movement exercise in all your playing. And yes, you want to increase your speed as you perfect the slower speeds. I assume you are using a metronome or some drum track during your practice. As you get an exercise down then increase the speed. Don;t increase again until you have mastered that speed and so on. I hope that answers your question.

W

[saw7988]

Thanks for the response Quark. That makes a lot of sense. I guess I was just getting confused by the way Justin described how you'd start out, because he said something like you don't even need to use a metronome, just go as slowly as possible.

But away I go to practice more...

[DaSilvaRenegade]

i think justin said to go slow so u can just focus on controlling ur fingers becuz if they are funny like mine they fidget on their own. going really really slow will help you control those small fidgety movements.

Duo

[embeer]

Hi, I've been doing this exercise for about a week. While I'm doing it I have a really weird and uncomfortable feeling in my left hand, it's not painful just uncomfortable. This only happens when I'm trying to do it really slow like a movement in every 3-4 seconds. When I'm doing it faster that feeling goes away. I don't know what I'm doing wrong. Please help.

[DaSilvaRenegade]

you arent doing anything wrong. When u do it that slow your hand wants to move a certain way. the uncomfortable feeling you r getting is ur mind and ur hand fighting over how your fingers move.

Duo

[embeer]

Thanks for the answer. So I'm guessing it will go away after I practice it a bit more.

[DaSilvaRenegade]

it will go away after a while of doing the exercise. wen it does u will have complete control over ur fingers. keep at it. which reminds me i need to get back into it again my hands r startin to act up

Duo

[ibanez303]

ok i need help ,,  i'm doing this exercise for exactly 2 days and i do it 10 minutes a day .

my question : when i have done the exercise and i'm going to play a solo or something is it normal that i play without paying attention to my minimum movement? or should i constantly pay attention to it?

sry for my bad english 

[FinnMcD]

This is my first post so hi everybody & to justin - if you ever read this yourself - GREAT site, keep up the good work.

My question is not about how to do this exercise but rather:

- will it help in ANY case, even the hard ones (i'll explain)?
- will other stuff like playing fast exercises or "regular" music and solos in an unmindful way hinder success?

Ok, this was the short version, now here's the background:

I've been playing for pretty much 15 years now (I don't know if that's a prove for how great Justin's page is or how lame I am  ). I'm probably the typical blues based player who doesn't (didn't) really care about how I play things as long as it works. But lately I've been trying to brush up my technique and I got attentive to my flying pinky. It's really just the pinky that flies, although I do believe that the problem has more to do with the ring-finger, because unless the ring-finger is involved everything's pretty fine.
Now the thing is, I do think that this and similar exercises really help me to tame the pinky but it still only works at very low speeds, and when I (have to) play faster, the pinky dances again.
Isn't this counterproductive? Or does this not matter too much? I really get the feeling it'd be best to only play this exercise and nothing else until it's up to my usual speed.
Do you think 15 years of flying pinky can be cured at all?
I'm really in doubt about how to go on.

[justinguitar]

This exercise is not a quick fix!

Doing it in this "extreme minimal movement" is not the truth - no one really plays with such small movements...

The idea is that by practicing making the movements so very small, is that when you play for real, the fingers will make smaller movements. But it will take a lot of time before the movements get instinctively very small.

It works, but just takes longer than people expect...

And yes Finn, it should help you too, flying 4th finger only is very common! J

[FM_Weasel]

Great lesson.  I always noticed that my fingers seems to to get wild and unwieldy when the pros always seemed to have such control.  I never thought to spend this much attention on correcting it, but I'm glad I found this lesson.  It's interesting how "correct" it feels when you focus so hard on keeping your fingers close to the fretboard, yet my finger's natural tendency is to try and fly away when I'm not concentrating on it.  Your body really fights you in that regard.  I'm glad you pointed this out.

[scorpiomike79]

but what is an exceptable amount of movement your fingers may fly away from the fret board???