Transcript included below…
Today, we’re going to talk about how someone can still enjoy playing the guitar even if they have arthritis.
Now, I myself don’t have arthritis (yet), and fortunately, I’ve been blessed so far to have continuous use of my hands and arms throughout nearly 30 years of guitar playing, without incident.
But we are not bound for this earth, and there may come a time when our hands may weaken, thereby limiting our ability to play some of the songs we can currently play.
In my travels, I’ve had a few people ask me about what to do if a guitarist has arthritis.
I don’t want to claim to be able to dispense medical wisdom, because I don’t have the background; nevertheless, I have a few things I could offer as suggestions. Remember, everyone’s body and hands are different, so what may be effective for one person may not be effective for another.
Also, what may come easily to one person may cause another person to run the risk of injury, re-injury, or exasperating an existing injury. So please be your own advocate and consider what I’m sharing here merely as an opinion, not a medical recommendation. Cool?
Here are a few thoughts that might encourage and empower a guitarist who has arthritic hands.
1. Stretch your hands intentionally and gently before and even after you play.
If you’ve been experiencing these episodes at Guitar Serious Fun for a while, you may have heard the story I shared about how I almost injured my hands due to overusing them with guitar and other instruments.
For a refresher on this story, check out Guitar Serious Fun Episode 34: “Can Practicing the Guitar Be Harmful?”, as well as Guitar Serious Fun Episode 77: “Rhythms of Rest for Guitar.”
In these episodes, I talked about how I read a couple books about Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and Repetitive Strain Injury and also worked closely with a physical therapist to strengthen my hands.
The stretches I’ve learned through those experiences are ones I share in the early lessons of GuitarSuccess4U with our members. So, if you want access to those (and so much more), please consider joining our membership. It could change the game for you.
Now I’m under no illusion that Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, Repetitive Strain Injury and Arthritis are all the same. They are most certainly not. But they all have something to do with the hands having weakness or fragility, so I think it’s worth doing a bit of research and learning more about how to attend well to our hands.
One of our guest experts in GuitarSuccess4U is Dr. Gordon Myco, a Chiropractor and health coach. Dr. Myco said in one of our lessons, “Take better care of your body than you do your guitar…because you can always get a new guitar.” Right?
2. Take breaks and always be conservative with hand use, not just while playing guitar, but while doing anything repetitive.
This includes yardwork, crafts, or anything mechanical, especially something that requires some strength. We do need to keep our hands moving, but we don’t want to strain the muscles and joints.
Breaks are super helpful, as we also talked about in “Rhythms of Rest for Guitar.”
Speaking of rest, the Lord does some wonderful things to repair muscles, joints and even vocal fatigue as we sleep. But if your hands are in any way compromised in their mobility and agility, it might be worth evaluating your sleep posture.
I don’t yet require them, but I am familiar with wrist guards that keep a person’s wrist in neutral position as they sleep, so that they don’t hyperextend them unwittingly.
But again, I’m not even confident to speak intelligently on the physiological definition of “hyperextension,” so I’ll step back from over-speaking here. Just think, “Wrist guards may eventually be worth considering.”
Now let’s get into the practical aspects of playing the guitar if you have arthritis.
3. Pray before you play.
This may sound familiar, because it is actually a past episode. It’s Guitar Serious Fun Episode 47, by the same title: “Pray Before You Play”. I encourage you to spin through that.
Is praying practical? Absolutely. Even offer a simple prayer like, “Lord, you’ve made my hands. I’m fearfully and wonderfully made, and I sense a calling from you to use my hands and the guitar for your glory, in this season. So please provide a way for me to do this, even if it’s a way I can’t yet see.”
4. If you’re an acoustic guitarist, make sure your action is low enough.
I’ve been an acoustic guitarist my whole career. And I’ve crossed paths with thousands of acoustic guitarists. Unfortunately, a significant number of them have guitars that have unnecessarily high action.
This could be because their instruments are in a lower pricing tier. They could have also just come from the store and haven’t been set up yet.
Mike Lull’s Guitar Works, the only shop I trust for repair and all the care of my guitars, was gracious enough to host me at their shop for one of our GuitarSuccess4U Expert Interviews. They took me on a special tour of their workbenches, showed me their Plek Pro machine, and talked about how “Guitar Repair and Care” can be essential to our success.
I was even granted permission to provide to my members a special additional short video interview with the late founder, Mike Lull, about his story, process and philosophy of guitar repair.
During the interview I conducted with the guys at the shop, Spencer Lull, Mike’s son and the President of Mike Lull’s Guitar Works, said that even a high-end guitar may still need to be set up by their shop. He said that the vast majority of the work they do is to set up guitars.
What does this entail? It could mean re-setting or replacing the nut or the saddle. Incidentally, this is the critical location where the strings are attached to the instrument. If either the nut, the saddle or both are too high, the action will be too high.
The truss rod may also need to be adjusted.
Ironically, there are guitarists out there trying to play music on guitars that have not yet been set up, or that have been improperly set up, and without exaggerating, this is severely hindering their progress.
It would be analogous to driving a car with tires that have very low air pressure.
You can still drive a car with really low pressure in the tires, but it’s not sustainable, and it’s much more difficult.
A well set up guitar increases morale.
I taught several workshops recently at the Christian Musician Summit in Tacoma, Washington, and as I spoke about the importance of having a guitar properly set up, I allowed my guitar to make its way around the room.
Each student present tried playing my guitar and handed it off to the next person. And the overwhelming response I heard back from many of them about my guitar was “This is much easier to play on. I think I really need to get my guitar set up properly.”
So in GuitarSuccess4U, one of the 5 instant bonuses my members get access to is a short video I put together called “10 Tips for Proper Guitar Setup.” Getting your guitar set up properly, especially by Mike Lull’s Guitar Works, could be a game-changer, especially if you have arthritis.
It could literally change the action to the point where you can play your acoustic with much greater ease. Notes you couldn’t access before could become more accessible.
Mike Lull’s Guitar Works repairs and sets up the guitars of Bob Dylan and Eric Clapton.
I mean, if their shop is good enough for those two well-known guitarists, it’s good enough for me. Look them up at MikeLull.com. Follow the menu to “repairs” where you’ll discover that they currently offer a free instrument assessment.
And please tell them David Harsh at GuitarSuccess4U sent you. I don’t currently get any sort of referral fee, but I do get the satisfaction of knowing that they are taking care of my people!
5. Try lighter gauge strings.
I use Elixir Nanoweb Medium Gauge Strings – from gauges 13 to 56. These have a bit of low end for a fuller sound, and they also allow me to tune to the many alternate tunings I like to play in.
I’ve played guitars that require light gauge strings because of how they are manufactured. Medium strings on those guitars would literally strain the neck.
But light gauge strings on a properly balanced and set up guitar neck could be another solution that would allow for more playability with less exertion by arthritic fingers.
6. If you haven’t already, try playing a classical nylon-string guitar.
These guitars provide several benefits, including the fact that the strings take less effort to fret because the strings are made of nylon, not steel. Also, because classical guitar necks are wider, the strings are further apart, so some chords are easier to form.
Now, I’m not a classical guitarist, so I don’t approach that guitar with the posture and hand angles that a classical guitarist would use. Nevertheless, I do find that classical guitars are much more responsive and require less hand strength, which might be a good next step with someone who has arthritic hands.
It all depends on what your fingers are capable of.
I’ve met guitarists who have arthritis who are able to navigate a 12-string acoustic guitar. That, to me, is surprising, because there are literally twice as many strings; each finger has to fret two strings simultaneously for every note.
But hey, if the instrument is responsive, and the guitarist has the strength and is enjoying playing the instrument, I say, make some great music!
7. Try an electric guitar.
Although I’m not an electric guitarist, I will readily admit that electric guitars typically have much more responsive string action, sometimes requiring even less pressure than a classical guitar would. Of the few times I’ve played a friend’s electric, I’ve observed this feature right away.
Depending on which type of electric (Stratocaster, Telecaster, etc.) you may discover variations in the guitar neck shape, and how the manufacturer has fashioned the instrument.
With this in mind, you may want to try playing a few different electric guitars, whether at a friend’s house or even in a guitar store showroom. Your hands will tell you what’s working…but remember, as I’ve mentioned, some of the guitars in that showroom – even the electric guitars – may not have been properly set up yet.
8. Experiment with some open / alternate tunings.
There are more possibilities for alternate tunings than you can imagine. But the ones that tend to require less fingers are ones that contain drones and low notes for an actual chord to be played open. Drones like low D A D on the three lowest strings, for example, can be foundational for an open D-based tuning.
DAD (on strings 6, 5 and 4) could be the basis for DADGAD (perhaps one of the most famous and well-loved tunings), but also DADF#AD (which is open D Major), or even DADFAD (open D minor, which actually allows for more versatility, as songs I’ve composed in that tuning have revealed.)
But if someone re-tunes a few of their strings (down, typically), entire worlds can open up where they can let a lot of the strings ring open, unfretted, to the relief of their fretting hand.
Side note: tuning strings down allows for lower tension and easier “fretability.” Is that a word? Nope, but you get it. Some tunings I’ve experimented with involve tuning some strings up. So try down-tuning first.
In some tunings, a single note can be fretted and slid up and down the neck, and it can still sound interesting. Some chords in alternate tunings require fewer fingers, which can be a relief.
Another side note: if you’re going to collaborate with someone else, it’s a nice gesture if you can know what some of the basic chords are in the alternate tuning in which you find yourself, because when they observe your hands on the frets, if they’ve got guitar or bass background, they’ll be confused to see you in unconventional locations playing “new” notes or shapes.
9. Experiment with some partial capos.
There are multiple partial capos on the market, some of which fret all but a single string, or just half of the strings. Note that a partial capo does not place a guitar in an alternate tuning; this is confirmed by playing a bar chord or a closed voicing scale in position above the capo, where the notes remain from where they were before the capo was applied to the guitar.
But a partial capo can allow for some fingerings with the use of fewer fingers. These can also allow for drone notes.
There was a capo manufactured years ago called the Third Hand, and fingerstyle guitarist Harvey Reid was super helpful about spreading the word about what this capo was capable of.
It has since been surpassed by the SpiderCapo, which basically fulfills the same function: six spinning tumblers that allow for 63 combinations of fretted notes per fret. It is the “Cadillac” of partial capos, because it allows for all possible options. The current model of the SpiderCapo that I have is not super rugged. It doesn’t feel like it’s been very well manufactured, so I kind of have to baby it on my guitar neck.
Through Harvey Reid, I was made aware of Liberty Guitar, a new method of playing guitar using a slightly altered tuning and a tool called a “flip capo.” Some of this method only uses the two middle fingers of the fretting hand, which may provide considerable relief for someone with arthritic hands and allows guitarist to get faster traction if their hands are not as strong.
As demonstrated by this concept, you can combine an alternate tuning with a capo, whether complete or partial. But do some experimenting and discover what’s possible.
10. Experiment with a bottleneck slide.
There are a few tunings, specifically DADF#AD (open D Major) and DGDGBD (open G Major) that have been fairly easy for me to tune to. Once there, I’ve tried using a slide up and down the neck, so as to facilitate the basic open I, then 5th fret IV and 7th fret V chords, for slide guitar.
This is an entire genre, and it definitely places the guitarist in a certain style of playing. But the “win” here is that he or she can play slide guitar with very little strain or stress of the fretting hand, because the reality is, they aren’t fretting. They’re placing the bottleneck or slide just against the strings, not even pressing down much, and they’re still making music.
11. Take a break from the guitar.
I don’t encourage someone to quit playing their guitar simply because they have arthritis. Hopefully, today’s discussion has shown my hope, to the contrary, that they stick with it.
But if someone’s hands are weak or tired, it might be nice for them to enjoy a short season of music on another instrument that’s less demanding. Instruments that come to mind are: harmonica, autoharp, hammered dulcimer, or even singing. Each of these are instruments where we can enjoy music without a lot of exertion of the hands.
Lastly…
12. Place yourself in the path of a guitar teacher or guitar community.
The road to musical proficiency can sometimes be lonely. And even after we’ve made significant progress, we can still experience moments of discouragement for one reason or another.
For this reason, I highly recommend GuitarSuccess4U. It’s a tribe of like-minded guitarists who are all accessing the same premium, curated collection of tools.
It’s not a support group per se, but it does provide tremendous support. For some of our members, these are their people. Guitar is not something everyone in the world speaks or understands, so when we gather for our weekly Zoom calls, there’s a level of empathy and understanding that isn’t found in other places.
Members experience accountability, encouragement, and an incredibly in-depth, yet accessible approach to the instrument.
Proverbs 15:22 says, “Plans fail for lack of counsel, but with many advisors, they succeed.”
I can think of two of our members currently who are on the journey of an arthritic guitarist.
What if you, as a guitarist who is struggling with arthritis, were to join us, become known in our community, and then discovered some collective wisdom from the group? It could be a game-changer for you.
All it takes is a tiny change in our trajectory to send us in a whole new direction.
I invite you to check out our website if you haven’t already – at GuitarSuccess4U.com.
We have a list of Frequently Asked Questions, and some sample lessons as well.
Re-cap
In closing, you might appreciate knowing that today’s episode came to life as a result of an e-mail exchange I had with someone asking for wisdom for a guitarist with arthritis. They asked the question, and here, in this episode, was my answer.
Can you see what a single question has produced in today’s episode?
If this discussion directly relates to you, I hope these strategies are in some way helpful to you as you persevere through the season of arthritis and still desire to make music on some level with your guitar.
So, if you have a question or a topic you think we might be able to tackle here at Guitar Serious Fun, let your thoughts be known in the comments for today’s episode.
As you may recall from Guitar Serious Fun Episode 22: “I Don’t Know…But Let’s Find Out,” I will intentionally avoid speaking about something I’m not familiar with, or pretend to know something I don’t. That’s just not how I roll.
But if the topic is in my wheelhouse, I’d be glad to share my thoughts here. So please continue to experience my offerings here and to share Guitar Serious Fun with others in your circles. We’ve got more great stuff coming up.
Thanks for experiencing my thoughts. I’ll see you next time.
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