Stretching fingers

I don't have little hands, but it is difficult to do 1 finger per fret and keep strings down at the nut end on a bass. You are not alone.

Best,

A :-)

a lot of it is hand strength and muscle memory, not flexibility. it's a good idea to stretch enough to keep your wrist loose, but for me, at least, i found that the longer i played for, the more flexibility i developed, because the muscles in my hands could make the fingers go where i wanted them to. so wouldn't worry too much about it. work on what you can do a bunch and keep working on things that press your limits, but don't worry if you fail from time to time. babies fall a thousand times before they can walk.

Well the thing I want to do is slide my hand and use my first three fingers and forget about my pinky. I keep hearing that is a really bad thing to do though.

you probably shouldn't neglect your pinky. i'm mostly a guitar player, and i used to practice hammer-ons with my pinky, which is fairly useless musically, but it does work on building strength quite well. that would probably be close to impossible on the bass, but you should try to use it.

And when the stretch seems challenging, remember to drop your thumb down to the middle of the back of the neck instead of hooking it over the neck. Keeping the thumb down helps you stretch farther.

+1

The thumb is so overlooked in stretches! With proper thumb position you can get 5-6 frets sometimes - maybe not in first position.

On the bass you can even use the side of that same thumb to fret a note and then stretch up with the pinky. Hopefully there's an alternate fingering for those kinds of things though :)

some of the best guitarists and bassists never learned how to use their pinky, or never built up it's strength.