-
<div>Danny, you said, “its not a natural motion…” And you are correct! The natural motion for our hands is to grasp. Our fingers naturally want to move as a unit. Guitar practice is like touch typing – it takes time and repetition. No instant gratification!</div>
About the hand pain, I can only recommend you go to the Skills Couses and go through Tony’s stretches. It works! Stretch a little before each session.
Keep going on the 30 Day course! Do not stay on a lesson more than 2 days. Keep progressing. Do not try to get the lesson down perfectly – you won’t. You need to first understand the concept being taught. Print off the tab for the lesson, and try to play through one note at a time. Then go to the practice video and reduce it to 50%. You are going for accuracy, not speed. Speed comes with time. You may find that after 10-20 minutes your playing gets worse. No worries! Fatigue is setting in. Stop and put the guitar up for a while. Come back later in the day and do a 10 minute refresher. the next day, before you begin the next lesson, go through the previous day’s lesson as a warm up. Then on to the next lesson.
In the 30 day course, Tony will teach you basic techniques, timing, and TWO CHORDS. I have been playing over 50 years, and found the 30 day course extremely helpful, as it showed me techniques I never tried, and broke a few bad habits. It felt like starting from scratch. I did not get any lesson down perfectly. I still have to go back and practice blues bass runs and scales to keep them fresh. You are looking for progress, not perfection at this point. Keep going!
Your next skill course should be My Next 6 Chords. This will help increase your dexterity and give you the chords to play along to a whole bunch of songs. Give each lesson a day or two and move on. After that go on to the Daily Challenges. And remember, they are CHALLENGES. I frequently flub my way through Monday and Tuesday, and do better the rest of the week, but the challenges have expanded my flexibility and have helped me to understand what really good guitarists are doing to sound that good. I may not be able keep up with them, but it is no longer a mystery.
On last thing. The daily challenges will expand your technique tool box. Try to teach yourself a new song every month. This will help keep things fresh. As Chet Atkins told Tommy Emmanuel, First, learn the melody. Next learn the chords. After that you can add to it to make it your own.