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The Left Hand of KlutzJune 21, 2006 After nearly three weeks of frequent interruptions (first WisCon, then two consecutive deadlines), I'm back to regular guitar practice. All those days off didn't help. I lost the ability to get all three fingers into a G chord simultaneously; instead ring finger hit the high (in pitch) E string with authority then first and second fingers fumbled into place on the A and low E respectively. After a week of drill drill drilling, my Gs seem to be coming back together. I've been trying to learn some embellishments for "Down in the Valley," which is not a complicated song. Two chords, D and A7: I can manage that. The variations on my instruction sheet look easy: how complicated can a two-finger chord be anyway? Hah. Instruction sheet says the A7sus4 (A7 with suspended fourth) is simpler than it looks. Wrong. It looks simple, but it isn't. Second finger stays put on the second fret of the D string. Third finger on second fret of B string yields to fourth finger on third fret of B string. Hah. Third and fourth finger are Siamese twinsies, and fourth finger has really appalling posture: standing up straight is beyond its current abilities, as is hitting the string square with the fingertip. Yeah, I can change the fingering to use first, second, and third fingers instead of second, third, and fourth. It works. But I wanna do it the way the guy in the book does! Then there are the bar chords. In a bar chord your first finger "bars" all (or most) of the strings on a fret while your other fingers make the chord; it works like a movable capo, very handy. It takes considerable strength to make a finger lie flat across the strings, especially when the finger is not quite straight. Funny how I never considered my slightly curved-to-the-left left forefinger a handicap. The right, with its permanently smushed first knuckle, seemed the one with the problem. My friends who started playing as teenagers don't seem to have had these problems. Or maybe they've just forgotten. In some cases, certain illicit substances may have enhanced their digital flexibility, or at least their perception thereof. I imagine teenage fingers as sinuous but strong, malleable and willing. How could I not have noticed? When I longed to play guitar as a teenager, all I could see was that my fingers were short.
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