What Did You Call My Fingers?
Preface (skip if this isn’t your first time here):
THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!
It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.
DON’T BE LIKE THEM!
Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks.
Hopefully, this will give you everything necessary to understand how to play the instrument, fix any flaws in your playing, and form ideas on how to change things up in your technique.
Your fingers have names. Yes, you heard me right folks, your fingers have names.
You’re probably thinking, “Duh, I know the names of my fingers. There’s the finger I use to pick my nose, the finger I use to flip people off, the finger I want a ring on, the finger that’s too small, and the finger of approval.”
While that’s great to know, for guitar we have names for the different fingers on our hands. Knowing the names of these fingers will help you understand guitar lingo from music, forums, videos, and of course your wonderful amazing teacher.
Let’s check out the diagram below.
One of the first things you’re going to notice is we have only four fingers named on each hand. The unuseful fingers are crossed out.
The right hand pinky is not particularly useful because of its size (so small). We just don’t have a huge use for it either for finger picking or for strumming.
The left hand thumb is used a lot, but it’s always on the back of the neck assisting your fingers with their job. Therefore, we don’t need to know if we need to use it because it’s always on.
O.K. now if you look a little closer, there’s a clear divide between your hands. Your left hand fingers are numbers while your right hand fingers are letters. This so you don’t get confused.
Now the left hand fingers are easy. Start with your index finger- that’s 1; middle finger- that’s 2; ring finger- that’s 3; and pinky- that’s 4.
The right hand fingers are a little more challenging to understand. P-I-M-A.
You’re probably wondering, “Why are they called that?”
Well pretty much all of guitar music has adopted the classical guitar right hand notation. Because it’s classical guitar, all of the finger names are español.
P= Pulgar
I= Indice
M= Medio
A= Anular
With all this said, it’s just easier to remember them by saying “PIMA” as one word. You can also try mnemonic devices which I’m sure are useful as well.
As we go on in this guitar basics series, we will be using the finger names so be sure to memorize them.