Right Hand Posture for Classical Guitar

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is John Armstrong with expertvillage.com I'm a professional guitar instructor and today we are going to be discussing beginning classical guitar. Okay now it is important to understand that we have discuss the fingers the labeling of the fingers and the finger nails on the right hand this is important to discuss the posture or the position which you hold the right handed. As I stated earlier the right arm will just kind of drape over the guitar and the right hand would rest kind of at the bottom of the sound hole typically speaking. What you want to do what you want to have you want to have a slight arch or arch to your wrist on the right hand and you want to have the thumb kind of angle straight. So when you look down as you are looking down you see almost a X that is created by the thumb and the fore finger. Okay kind of a X created like that. That is what you want to see. You don't want the thumb behind the index finger. You want it out in front of the index finger and straight and kind of the finger tips of the eye and the A fingers lined up almost directly under the knuckle of the hand. This allows you to move back and forth across the strings while maintaining a even amount of pressure and even tone across all the strings as you are moving from string to string. Very important that you do that it takes a lot of getting use to a lot of your traditional finger pickers. On a steel string guitar you would have a flat wrist and that is fine for that style of music if it works good. But, for classical guitar in order to play correctly you really kind of need to arch the wrist. Keep that X created between the index and fore fingers. Some people like to think of it like you are kind of grabbing a tennis ball over the guitar so of a image you could keep to help you try to maintain proper right hand position. Like I said the tips of the finger line up under the knuckle of the hand very important that we do that. "