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Do You Really Need Long Fingers to Be a Good Guitarist?


Ellen Hansley

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John Lennon changed the world with a 3/4-sized Rickenbacker (that looks too small on him and funny to me)... Susannah Hoffs from The Bangles uses that same model and it looks like a normal-sized guitar on her.

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They make smaller guitars and smaller scale-lengths. Dean Ween (from the band Ween) plays Fender Musicmasters, which are also 3/4-scale guitars... I tried to play one of those once at someone's house and felt like I was playing a ukelele...

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I am 6' tall (and let's not get into the footage I keep adding horizontally)... in high school at about 15 I shot from being 5 feet tall to about 5'10", and string-bean thin.... I had just saved up and bought a perfect-for-me Yamaha guitar (SC-400... a set-neck, Gibson-scale guitar with 3 Strat-like pickups, that looks like a Samurai Mosrite or something) and it instantly looked a little small on me... I also got my hands on a real Rickenbacker guitar at the time and was Heartbroken to find that my deluxe-sized meathooks were too big to play those weird tiny necks, really... and Les Pauls and SGs looked small on me, much different than on Peter Frampton, Angus Young, Jimmy Page, Marc Bolan, Randy Rhoads, Mick Jones from The Clash... I said something about that in a guitar store, looking in a mirror, and the salesman said "all of those dudes are tiny, man. I don't think one of them is taller than 5'5"! " That famous Telecaster looked huge on one of my heroes, Andy Summers from The Police... and watching him play, he rolls and slides his small hands around the fingerboard a lot to do things my fingers can just reach and does a much better job than I.

So between instrument choices (and guitars made for taller/larger people are a relatively recent development because people have generally gotten taller and bigger compared to the past) and technique, I'd say there is not disadvantage to having smaller hands.

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On 2/24/2023 at 11:43 PM, o0Ampy0o said:

 

Making music most certainly can be a competition. Aside from literal contests it is a matter of whatever floats your boat. Brian Wilson has acknowledged penning some of his greatest music with the mindset of competing with The Beatles. The Number 1 Hit topping the charts most definitely is merited, motivating, desired, a status symbol and monetarily rewarding. It is also seen as a stepping stone to other opportunities.

 


Making music (art) is not a competition... being inspired to be more ambitious by healthy artistic competition is not a race or a business battle.

If that were the case at this moment this forum would be shut down and DJ&RapperForum would take its place with thousands of members posting daily

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