I have absolutely no problem relaxing - just sit me down on the sofa with a glass of wine and I guarantee I'll be so relaxed I might even fall asleep. However put me in charge of a guitar and ask me to play it, while remaining relaxed, and I have absolutely no idea how to do it. We all get tense when we are doing something unfamiliar, but you would think after a few thousand tries I might have figured this out by now. No such luck.
I’ve got lots of excuses – lack of flexibility so I need pressure required to keep my fingers in place, unfamiliar hand/arm positions, and of course, how much does it matter anyway?
But maybe the biggest reason is I don’t know what it feels like to truly relax, I pretty much always play tense. However recently while working on some Carlevaro octave shifting exercises I managed to relax on my way up the fretboard (aided and abetted by gravity). I actually experienced what relaxing my left hand feels like. Wow! My arm/hand movement was much easier and more fluid.
However incorporating this into general playing is still not easy. Perhaps it's because I have always assumed that relaxing was an absence... ie "don't tense up"! Then while reading Daniel Nistico's email newsletter, I noticed that he talks about actively relaxing - in other words it's something you actually have to make an effort to do! This may seem like semantics, but there seems to be a big difference between trying NOT to tense up vs. trying TO relax - in fact it was my guitar teacher telling me to actively relax various fingers that resulted in me experiencing 'that relaxing feeling'. As a first step to incorporating this into my playing, whenever I'm having difficulty I'm stopping what I'm doing to see if I have too much tension and can manage to relax something. Perhaps not surprisingly it often works.
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