Distance = Time

Practice playing slower, and staying lower to the fret board. Master that, and then increase your speed slightly... Master that, and increase it more.

Unfortunately, that is extremely common, at first anyway. But in my experience it is something that always has to be paid attention to. But the above advice is correct. You have to take it slow when practising and work up speed gradually while paying attention to keeping those fingers under control. (But not too tense, either.) Easier said than done, it won't happen overnight. Keep at it. Much has been said about this here, I bet you can find some previous posts here that discuss this at greater depth. Slow practising won't always sound like "music", but it is the only way to develop speed and accuracy. :wink:

Thanks for the advice. I think I'm being too impatient and trying to play at speed too soon.

Dave

You'll play faster if your fingers are close to the fretboard. You'll develop faster fingers if your fingers are far away from the fretboard - your reflexes have the same amount of time to move a longer distance.

Pianists recognize this apparent contradiction... I remember my piano teacher constantly telling me "lift your fingers!" when doing drills like Hanon; I never heard a comment like that when we worked with performance pieces.

So go ahead and practice with high fingers. But also practice with them close to the frets - eventually that will feel more natural, and you'll use the speed you've developed.

I still swear by Scott Tennants book Pumping Nylon.
It is basically a book full of exercises for both your left and right (fingerstyle) hands.
Exercises to keep your fingers close to the strings (too much to go into detail here) boil down to playing things, such as chromatic scales, and leaving all of your fingers holding down the last fret it played until needed again.

Thanks everyone
I think I'll pick up the book. After reading the reviews it sounds like something that would help. I've got arthritis in my hands and need some way to strengthen them..especially the left hand.

Dave

Use a metronome, start at maybe 60 or70 bps and when you master a progression at that speed, bump it up 5 bps or so , after a couple weeks you'll see a big difference.