Short fingered players

[DarkArwen]

When you spread your fingers as far as possible, what kind of angle do you see between thumb and pinkie, and index finger and pinkie? I regularly do stretches and I get about 180 degrees between thumb/pinkie and 120 degrees between index/pinkie.

It's the fascia in my palm and between fingers that I've been stretching. My hands are not gigantic, and I can get 4 frets low on a 34" easily.

Thumb and index, about 90 degres
thumb and pinkie.. I think about 140 to 160 :-(

I do 124 for the low frets. I can do 5-8 1FPF reasonably and am golden from the 7th fret up.
I am realizing now that for the D and G strings I am serious thumb wrapper. I'll cut that stuff out and see if it helps any.

 

[okcrum]

I first started to notice that I could reach a little further on bass when I first started to play keyboard (just for figuring out changes and things, I'm not a real player) and was stretching thumb/pinkie to get the span to try out different chords there.

 

[schmittzil]

When i was 4'9 I played everything up top and a good bass that I used more then is the GSR200, now I am 5'8 with large hands from breaking my pinky finger....really big stretch now, don't break you pinky though....It hurts.

 

[BillW87]

5'6" bassist with some humbly-proportioned hands here.

Honestly the way I dealt with not having a great span was to get comfortable playing across the entire fretboard instead of feeling restricted to the first five frets. The frets are closer together the higher you get up the neck, and unless you're playing notes in the range of E-A you shouldn't feel required to stick around near the headstock. Yes, the tone is slightly different playing in different positions on the neck, but being able to groove comfortably and play your part without mistakes is much more important than being a tone freak. And yes, unfortunately us smaller-handed bassists are just going to have to do more shifting, and although I've found that my stretch has gotten a bit better over the years its certainly not been enough of a change to affect my approach.

Also, learning to selectively finger tap notes with your right hand between normal finger picking can be a cool way to artificially increase your stretch and impress an audience too.

 

[Drifta]

just takes time, I have small hands but i've adjusted.


Theres no need for 4 fret changes if you can find the note elsewhere on the board.

It took me awhile, but all i play now is a 5 string 35" scale bass with 19mm spacing.... Love it.