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It might sound obvious, butOne thing that gets in the way of developing hand synchronization—without us even realizing it—is bad timing, especially in terms of the fretting hand.
It might sound obvious, but there are some other hidden factors impacting your timing abilities.
Let’s say you’re working on triplets with the fretting hand only. You’ve taken one of the common three-note-per-string shapes and decided to drill some reps. It might look something like EXAMPLE 1.
All the notes should be of the same length and occur in the right place, for a count of 1-2-3, 1-2-3 and so on. However, what often happens is the errant fingers have a mind of their own and decide to rush through the notes, throwing the pace completely off.
You might end up with something like EXAMPLE 2, which is essentially two 16th notes followed by an elongated 8th note at the end. By itself, as an intended effect, there’s nothing wrong with that result, but if you’re intention was triplets, there’s clearly a lack of control going on.
And just imagine if you tried to synchronize that with a picking hand that actually could play triplets just fine. You’d constantly be fighting against yourself without realizing why it’s not getting any better. In these cases, it’s good practice to check that your fretting hand is playing the correct note values before you add the other factor of the picking hand.
But let’s say you’ve done the checks and your fretting hand isn’t playing ball. Why does this happen?
In truth, it’s just a lack of finger strength. A weak finger can’t hold itself in a certain position for that long without wanting to relieve itself of the task. The most common way of doing this is to quickly shift the burden onto another finger, thereby rushing