Pinky question

[KGreene]

I think the best tip I ever heard for "pinky control" was a very simple but direct statement from Adam Steffey (i believe).... "if your not good with your pinky, get good with your pinky." ..... Use whatever practice ritual works best for you.

It worked for me anyway.

JMTCW

[sblock]

...a very simple but direct statement from Adam Steffey (i believe).... "if you're not good with your pinky, get good with your pinky." ...

Sound advice, indeed!

[Beanzy]

The reason for not engaging with the parts of the posts I don't disagree with is because there's nothing to discuss and I have nothing to add to them. That would be just filling up space to no effect, there have been enough threads in the past with posts outlining the connections you keep posting about, I don't have anything to add and repetition by multiple posters just clogs up a thread.

However in your posts I think you may have misunderstood the nature of well designed exercises, leading you off on a tangent.
You even postulate some need for a physical difference for some people in order to be able to play with a controlled little finger.
As long as people aren't damaged in some way I don't think that it is necessary to introduce exceptional physique as a factor ie; for people to have some physical difference from others in order be able to gain better control over their "flying fingers". Just to be clear, in case it's not obvious; I'm not saying people couldn't or don't have physical differences which can give them advantages, that happens in any activity. However if you take something like the exercise I outlined as an example, (let's call it the "pinky damper" exercise) then you can see how well designed training can work with the body by conditioning us to become relaxed with a hold or position by eliminating obstacles that prevent us from being able to achieve our aims. Note in case it's not clear enough, this just refers to what happens in the exercise, not while you play in a real world situation, exercises are often designed to do what would otherwise be considered weird in a playing situation. At the risk of a lengthy post I'll try to explain why well designed exercises like this can help and in doing so hopefully reveal why you don't need special physical abilities to be able to control flying fingers, or gain control over the little finger.
I'm not saying there won't be people who are unusually limited by some physical trait, just that if you're not then efficient control is there to be had by people with a normal physique.

At first I found this one to be a bit strange, in fact when Rex showed it I remember thinking "you can't do that" and "what's the use for real playing?" Then of course as happens in any group, a couple of people in the class got it fairly quickly, and he played some real tune examples where he actually uses it, and the differences in how the notes ended was obvious. I didn't actually manage more than a rough approximation during his lessons, with lots of involuntary snagging and frustration. But what I realised aftewards was that my hand position had really settled down and my other fingers were becoming much better behaved too, from doing an exercise focussed on my little'weakest' finger.
Preventing tension and limiting unnecessary movement seem to be a focus of many exercises, and in that pinky damper one you can analyse how it might achieve that.

First trick I think it uses is to give the pinky something to do; You get told to line the pinky up across the fretboard and leave it there while playing during the exercise. In order to even get close to achieving that the other fingers need to behave and not be flying up, otherwise that 3rd finger will just rip the pinky out of place or as happens me it snags into a curl if the third gets too lively. (I've actually started using that to do left hand pizzicato on the fiddle now, lift the third off hard and it tenses up the back of the hand & my pinky snaps from it's normal relaxed curve bobbing along with the others into a tight curl, rough as heck but very loud)

The second trick I think it uses is to get you to line up the pinky across the fretboard and it sets that as a very visual goal.
That means that the hand has to line up with the neck, so the other fingers have to move efficiently if the little finger is to stay in place. But we're not made to focus on them it's all supposedly focussed on the little finger, we just have to make them behave if the stated pinky position is to be achieved. I think this is the cleverest part about exercises like these, they often don't focus on all of what is being achieved, they give you the headline focus, but you are left to work out how to achieve the rest by working with your individual body characteristics. Things like different finger lengths, palm widths etc are left for the individual to figure out. By focussing on keeping the pinky straight across the fretboard as a main objective, it also prevents you twisting the hand away from the line of the neck. In order to give the first three fingers room to manoeuvre it makes you give more from the left side of the hand, rather than lift the right side away.

As an aside:The G chop chord trick of placing the pinky and third before the others reminds me of this particular approach, it doesn't go into detail about how that makes you bring the hand around the neck more or how reaching back down the neck with 1st &2nd is more controlled than reaching up the neck. There's a similar cello exercise to accustom people to reaches by using the 3&4 as the anchor and reaching back rather than stretching forward.

The third trick it seems to use is telling you to relax the pinky. To do that the whole hand has to shed tension.
It reminds me of the trick of putting the shetland pony in with all the firey thoroughbreds. They all calm down when there's the obvious runt in the herd. By working to the needs of the weakest, or most prone to the effects of tension, the others have to work to a much lower level of tension or it will fail. This is a big part of why I persisted with the exercise after the week, despite my initial impression that it was just an interesting trick, I could feel how I was having to relax the whole hand and at that point tension was a big issue for me. I already had proof that Rex had sorted out my arm tensions with one mornings 'tricks' so I was prepared to work on it more & knew he wasn't just recommending some fancy nonsense. This exercise and some other minimum effort ones really got me working with much less effort.

Anyway those are just a few of the ways that one exercise helps by working with rather than against peoples own physique.

There are plenty of exercises I have tried where I've just never got what's going on or where I've thought they were doing those unnatural 'guitarish' ache-inducing forced stuff. I give up on that kind of thing straight off, life's too short & health too important to go risking it with contortions. But this and a few others I regularly revisit just to remind my hand & take a time out to see if I'm letting tension creep back in to things. I should also say I'm not normally playing with my pinky straight across the fretboard & I don't try to keep it static either, it just sits there in a relaxed curve as long as the other fingers are behaving bobbing along hovering ready until needed. But every now and then it does get used as a damper too, especially on the mandoloncello to control sustain or crop a note.
The thing I would say again from my previous post is, you don't have to be efficient or elegant to play, but you may wan't to be for various advantages that will give you. With a bog-standard physical make up and a few well designed exercises from good teachers it's within your grasp. I consider myself to have been lucky to have had those (except for fat fingers with arthritis, I'll swap those for an upgrade anytime)