Bad habit? Tension in the plucking hand

[wld3]

An instructor named Dave Marks has several video lessons on YouTube. Overall, he is quite amiable and seems to be knowledgeable as well. In this video, he states that you can correct a bad habit in your plucking hand by curling your non-used fingers in while playing.

Take a look at the video to see what I mean.

Do you think he is correct about this? I can understand about not having the hand tense, with the pinky pointing up to the sky and all that, but is consciously curling the fingers in important?

[Erick Lam]

What's important is not having tension. Pointing to the sky definately adds tension. I suggest leaving the other fingers on the strings instead. Search for Gary Willis' videos (#2 and #3) on youtube.

[Hiromakuta]

Originally Posted by wld3

An instructor named Dave Marks has several video lessons on YouTube. Overall, he is quite amiable and seems to be knowledgeable as well. In this video, he states that you can correct a bad habit in your plucking hand by curling your non-used fingers in while playing.

Take a look at the video to see what I mean.

Do you think he is correct about this? I can understand about not having the hand tense, with the pinky pointing up to the sky and all that, but is consciously curling the fingers in important?

It´s not the curling itself. You should rather concentrate on relaxing the pinky as much as possible while playing. When it is relaxed, it naturally curls a bit.
So you should strive for relaxing the pinky, instead of forcing it to curl.

[wld3]

Originally Posted by Erick Lam

What's important is not having tension.

Originally Posted by Hiromakuta

...you should strive for relaxing the pinky, instead of forcing it to curl.

This was my thinking as well.

Originally Posted by Erick Lam

Search for Gary Willis' videos (#2 and #3) on youtube.

Thanks. I'll do that.