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If you would like to gain full access to all our Guitar Teaching Materials please visit the Secret Guitar Teacher Site and take a free tour: http://secretguitarteacher.com/youtube/ssb/Beginner/PPCku_4NQH8/130524518-are-my-fingers-too-big.php

To find guitars specially adapted for players with larger hands try my friend Mark's EBay channel: http://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/mdphillips1956mark?_trksid=p2047675.l2559

Here's the abridged transcript of this lesson:

When you first start learning guitar it can often seem completely impossible that you could ever hold down a string with one finger…without that finger tip obstructing the strings either side of it . …causing the obstructed strings to sound either buzzy …or dead.

This can of course be immensely frustrating and I know for a fact that it is one cause of people giving up the guitar, wrongly assuming that they are just not physically cut out for it.

In this little video we’ll take a quick look at three solutions to this problem.
One of the most common causes of the problem is simply that your guitar doesn’t fit you.

We all have different sizes and shapes of hands and fingers. Short fingers, long fingers; fingers fat as sausages or skinny as French fries. Narrow palms, wide palms, short palms, long palms… And because of these differences, guitar manufacturers produce guitar necks with a fair amount of variation in shape and size.

For example, here are three broad classifications of neck profile, each named after letters of the alphabet which resemble the shape of the cross-section of the neck. You can perhaps see that the ‘C’ shaped profile of my guitar neck comfortably fits my palm size and finger length.

So my first tip is to hunt down guitars with different shaped neck profiles and find the one that best suits your hand shape. But most importantly for people with chunky fingers is the neck width as measured at the nut of the guitar.
The nut is this little bit of plastic fixed at the end of the fret board and its main job is to keep the strings evenly spaced apart. When we talk about nut width it is important to measure from the groove where the bottom string sits…to the groove where the top string sits. So that’s from Bottom E string to top E string.
And here is a rough guide of the range of nut widths that are typical of different types of acoustic guitar. You can see that there is significant variation.

A wider nut width keeps the strings spaced further apart and goes a long way towards reducing the problem of chunky finger tips obstructing the adjacent strings.The next thing to check is just how you use your fingers to press down the strings. Most of us have finger tips that are wider …than they are deep
So, placing the fingers this way…is more likely to cause obstruction than placing them this way . Experiment with angling your hand so that the narrowest part of the finger is used to contact the string and press it against the fret.
Notice that you may have to alter your wrist position, the angle of your forearm, position of your elbow and even your shoulder to make possible, the best approach with your finger tip. There are no hard and fast rules, different things work for different hand shapes and sizes. So the message here is very much to Experiment to find the best approach for you.

Finally, perhaps reassuringly, no matter how bad this problem is for you right now, I can promise that the more you practice the more likely you are to overcome the problem. This is partly because you automatically improve your finger positioning with practice as the information coming back to your brain via your ears is translated into minute corrections of finger positioning. But also, the more you play, the harder your finger tips get and this prevents them broadening out as you press down on the string.

If you found this little video useful, please click on the ‘Like’ button if there is one, or leave a comment, and do feel free to share the video with your friends.

And if you’d like to gain full access to all our guitar teaching materials please visit the Secret Guitar Teacher website and take a free look round at what’s available there.

See you again soon!