No, not that finger. No, not one-half of the peace sign. I’m talkin’ about yours and mine, the fourth and usually smaller fourth, or little finger.
For many years trying to learn a stringed instrument I really didn’t pay attention to the length and size of musicians’ hands, but even more so I didn’t pay attention to the length of everyone’s (including myself) “pinky.”
I don’t really know, but it seems to me that the length a person’s pinky giveshim or her an advantage when it comes to reaching certain notes on a fretboard or fingerboard of a musical instrument. When I started to notice the length of a musician’s pinky, and other three fingers in general, it seemed like a flash of insight into how they could reach certain notes and chord positions that I couldn’t.
One of my favorite examples of a musician with the gift oflong, long, long fingers and a pinky to match(that is almost/maybeas long as the third finger) is the gifted mandolinist Chris Thile. Check out his fingers sometime. To me they look like #2 pencils that can easily stretch from the first fret of a musical instrument all the way to the twelfth fret (even though that’s probably not realistic unless it’s a uke).
BryonBerline, fiddle, giant hands (compared to medium hands). He almost seems to reach second positions on the fiddle without getting out of first position. He has gifted hands. Maybe because he was a football player he needed big hands to hold the football, and he got the giftf or that when he was conceived. And then that applied to the fiddle when he started playing around the age of five.
And of course there are many other musicians who have long, long fingers. All four of them.
I started to get discouraged because of my not so long fingers, unable to reachcertainpositions, especially my little finger which only goes a little bit past the middle of my third finger.What to do? What to do? So I figured I’d have to settle for that, and I was limited.
Then at a FDF Grass Valley Festival I went to a workshop with Michael Cleveland, and wow! Medium sized hands, not an incredibly long pinky.That got me off antidepressants because of the size of my hands, and motivated me to new heights to keep playing and figuring out ways to reach certain positions that I couldn’t do before.
It’s probably safe to say that a heck of a lot of musicians just have medium, average size hands. Even so, some of them have that pinky that is almost as long as their third finger.Of course there are often ways of doing things in different ways to achieve the same result. Knowing that, you can experiment, or get private lessons to increase your playing potential.The long-and-short of it is, in the end, size really does matter. Even though it doesn’t….
