Originally Posted by: ChristopherSchlegel

Originally Posted by: cheaviag

still having difficulty getting the pinky finger onto the 6th string while holding the othert three fingers down, no where near perfect with the other three once I start getting into the lower 5th and 6th (E and A) strings but no matter how I twist my wrist, thumb, guitar or hold my tongue I simply can't get it into postion while doing the spider legs excercise.

You don't need to hold the notes behind the highest note.

Use just enough pressure to hold down any note. Once you've played the note, release the pressure. You can still make contact the string in order to make your motion efficient, especially if you are going back to that note any time soon. But you don't need to waste effort holding it down. The next note on the higher fret is going to create the sound you need & make the lower fretted note irrelevant.

You can even slide your hand up a bit and move away from positioning your finger over the lower notes in order to reach higher notes. When you move back down to another another fret, just slide your hand back to that position. Try to use minimal motion, but move as necessary to reach the notes comfortably.

The entire point behind the spider legs exercise is to use each one of your fingers to fret notes to build some dexterity. But it's not necessary to hold all of them in place. In fact it is often counterproductive because it is a waste of effort & makes you hand less agile.

Hope that helps!

That helps a LOT ! I was always trying to maintain pressure on the lower notes on the same string and trying to keep my hand and thumb in the one spot.. which wasn't working terribly well with my 61 year old paws and was getting very very despondant.