One of the challenges of playing the guitar is the very different set of skills demanded of our two hands. For each skill, taken in isolation – right-hand arpeggios, left-hand slurs, right-hand repeated chords, left-hand shifts, and so on– there is no shortage of exercises for us to practise. Yet I have often been struck by how little we discuss one of the most fundamental difficulties of all: making the two hands work at the same time. We are all multitaskers.
Let’s look at a typical test of multitasking: performing a passage in hymn-like texture, such as the Coral from Mompou’s Suite compostelana (1962). To make this movement sound like a choir, as the title dictates, we must create at least the illusion of a continuous legato between the chords. And at first sight, it’s the left hand that presents all the difficulties: the arm has to move rapidly between positions while the fingers take new chord shapes. On closer examination, however, the right hand faces its own demands. For one thing, there will be no legato unless the right-hand fingers find and pluck the strings in exact synchronicity with the left. For another, the right hand has to voice the chords if the parts are to sing independently and the chordal dissonances are to speak.
But this passage poses another, less obvious, challenge.
Throughout, the right hand has to switch between different configurations of strings, some quite straightforward, others less so. Compare, for example, the first chord in bar 1 with the two chords in bar 2:
The opening chord places the right-hand fingers on adjacent strings – the most familiar configuration. But the chords in bar 2 leave strings between index and middle, which is rather awkward.1
In fact, it is my experience that if either hand faces difficulties in a passage, then no matter how simple the task of the other hand, it uses up precious resources, subtly diluting the attention we need. One might compare it to one computer program slowing down another. In our Mompou example, then, even if the right hand did not face the difficulties I have described, it would still present an obstacle. The hands tend to interfere with one another.
Pianists face similar issues, which is why for them, practising with the hands separately is a routine procedure. Should we do the same? Of course, many guitarists do; but practising with one hand alone proves less natural on the guitar than on the piano, because the majority of the pitches we have to produce require both hands. On its own the left hand produces little or no sound, so when practicing without the right hand one has to work to keep a sense of gesture and expression. As for the right hand, many students find that at first, they cannot separate it from the left hand at all. That is because the right hand tends to work in the dark: many guitarists are unaware of right-hand fingering in detail. Even when one has learned to play with the right hand alone, the result is an endless fanfare of open strings – I have heard Eliot Fisk suggest that reducing a piece of music to the open strings is an ear-deadening activity! Still, many teachers and students find value in this kind of work, and I think it is worth working with the hands separately to ensure that one is aware in detail of what each one has to do.
Practising the Hands in Alternation
That said, let’s return to Mompou’s Coral and try something else: a kind of practice that I encountered in a guitar magazine as a young beginner (unfortunately I can’t remember where, but I am very grateful to whoever wrote the article). The essence of this technique is to practice the motion of the two hands in alternation. It is a form of slow practice in which each movement is done precisely and reflectively without, for now, worrying about the music’s rhythm and tempo. It goes like this:
- Place the right-hand fingers on the strings, ready to play the first chord.
- Finger the chord with the left hand.
- Play the chord.
- Repeat for the next chord.
Simple as it is, this procedure can teach one a lot about how the hands work together. First of all, students often have difficulty separating out the individual steps. Let’s try step 1: if, on placing the right-hand fingers on the strings, your left hand instantly and instinctively moved to finger the chord, try again and see if you can send a clear message from your brain just to your right hand, with no interference from the left. What about step 2? It is a rare student who, on fingering the chord with the left hand, can resist sounding it with the right hand more or less simultaneously. If this happens to you, you are not yet committing to making just one movement at a time.
Clearly, if steps 1 and 2 have gone right, then nothing can go wrong in step 3. All the more reason, then, to forget about this last step and to focus instead on refining the first two. At step 1, for instance, I might ask myself which part of the finger touches the string, precisely. Is it the same every time? I aim to make contact close to the groove between fingertip and nail, as this point is very sensitive. If I can be consistent with that contact in practice, I will notice the benefit in performance, when nerves become a factor. The same considerations apply to step 2, fingering the chord: not only must I get each finger as close to the fret as practicable, I have to find the minimum pressure required.
What if I have difficulty playing a particular chord cleanly? The problem must be in either step 1 or step 2: the moment of finding the strings with each hand. In this Coral, suppose that my right hand has some difficulty with the first chord in measure 2. Let’s try it this way:
- Play the first measure (either in time or according to the procedure described above), then
- place the right hand ready on the strings for the downbeat of measure 2, and then –
- stop!
- Wait; let everything process.
By stopping, I don’t even reach the stage of fingering the chord with the left hand, because I want to take in just how it feels to find this chord with the right hand. At this point I’d rather not go any further in case it complicates what I’m trying to master. Instead, I’ll go through this same procedure a few more times. When I’m ready, I’ll continue with fingering the left hand and sounding the chord. In due course, I’ll play the passage – just not right now.
Equally, if the problem with measure 2’s downbeat was the left hand rather than the right, then I might go as far as stage 2, and then again – stop. Whatever the problem, when working on this procedure with students I’m curious to see if they can commit to stopping and waiting between each stage. If they are not, then it suggest that they are not yet conceiving of each movement as something separate that can be refined and mastered on its own. Multitasking starts with a single task.
The Magic of Stopping
Students of the Alexander Technique may find some resonance in this notion of stopping and waiting. Certainly, in the expressive act of performance, the musical gestures must flow unimpeded; but between hesitating and rushing there is a whole world to explore.
In The Use of the Self (1932) and other writings, F.M. Alexander made a distinction between the end (in this case, sounding the chord) and what he called the means-whereby. His contention was that as long as one is striving after the end, one is always to some extent ruled by habit. By giving one’s attention simply and fully to each step as it comes, the end comes anyway, but now informed by the quality of its component steps.
Now, the only way to find out if one is truly with each step is to see if one can stop at any point – not just slow down, or pause, but really step aside mentally and physically. Alexander called this inhibition: we might today call it something like ‘refreshing our options’. Then, Alexander observed, one might after all go on to the end of the procedure (here, playing the chord), or one might do something else entirely (sing the notes? go and make tea?), or one might do nothing at all. In fact, there can be something rather satisfying about breaking off one’s work on the difficulty in question, choosing not to play the passage through for now, with the thought that one can come back tomorrow and work on it some more. We have all the time we need.
Linking Simultaneous Movements in a Chain
So what about the order of the steps described – right hand, left hand, play? Could it as well be left hand, right hand, play? Probably! But when it comes to making the journey back from practice to performance I have found a lot of value in the order given. Once I have mastered stopping and waiting between each step, I start to put steps 2 and 3 as close together as possible: as soon as the left hand feels ready on the strings, with just the right placement and pressure, the right hand (already prepared in step 1) responds by plucking the strings to sound the chord.
And here an essential point emerges. There can come a stage when the response between left hand and right is instantaneous: in effect, they play at the same time. But for the performer, there is still a fundamental order to the movements. The sensation is that of a chain, the left hand prompting the right, giving it permission to pluck the strings. (Note that the right hand can prepare well in advance of the sound or more or less as it plays, depending on articulation and other factors.) In her books on violin playing, Kató Havas makes a similar point when she says that the left hand leads the right – even though on the violin, as on the guitar, it is not the left hand that produces the sound. To be sure, by linking these three steps, we have reconstructed exactly the kind of chain reaction that initially I warned against. But this is a different chain to the one we started with. It is now informed by Alexander’s means-whereby.
Many aspects of music-making depend on building some kind of chain. For example, memorisation, when it happens unconsciously, is little more than each event reminding us of the next. But this form of memorisation – learning by rote – is highly unreliable. If one thing is forgotten, so is everything that follows. To guard against this, we must do all we can to break the chain: starting at different points in the piece, breaking the music down into its components, and so on. Ultimately, the chain grows back afresh, but now each link relates to the whole, not just the link immediately before or after.
Coordinating one’s hands, then, is not a matter of trying to do two movements simultaneously, but rather of putting the movements into the right relationship, allowing one to follow from the other without hesitation. To the audience it may seem as though movements of great precision are happening with pinpoint simultaneity; but if in the learning process one has built a chain, then no matter how close together two movements are, there is always space between them. We have all the time we need.2
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For more on the fundamentals of right- and left-hand technique, see chapters 2 and 3 of Guitar.
- There is a study exploring unfamiliar right-hand configurations by Stephen Dodgson: no. 6 (Dodgson and Quine, Studies for guitar, book 1). Dodgson once recalled that he wanted to explore unusual voicings on the guitar and his editor and collaborator, Hector Quine, realised that this idea had technical value for the right hand. The result is a miniature in other-worldly sonorities. ↩︎
- An earlier version of this article first appeared in Catalogue and Compendium (Cleveland: Guitars International, 2010). I am grateful to Armin Kelly of Guitar International for permission to post a new version here. ↩︎
Guitar (Menuhin Guides) 