posted by mahler82
The significance of sitting with your spine straight and your chest out should be emphasized for several reasons. For one thing, sitting straight requires less effort than slumping. When you are slumped over, you have to fight gravity because it pulls your body down in many places. When you are sitting straight, however, gravity only pulls the body down along the axis of your spine. Furthermore, when your spine is straight, your chest expands more, and it is therefore much easier to breathe properly. When your breathing is right, your mind is more alert, and musical phrasing comes more naturally.
The guitarist who is hunched over his instrument with his head hanging down cannot breathe properly. Thus he becomes tense and has technical difficulties. Another reason for sitting straight is to avoid pinched nerves resulting from excessive twisting of your spine, because you have many nerves coming from your spine to your hands and other parts of your body. Pinched nerves can cause your muscles to weaken, to say nothing of backaches. The resulting physical discomfort is distracting and consequently leads to mistakes in performing. Slouching or excessive twisting of the spine can also have the effect of hindering the free flow of nerve energy between the body and the brain. This can inhibit mental clarity as well as bodily functions.
The sitting position has a strong effect on your attitude toward playing the guitar for other people. A balanced, upright position in which you lean slightly forward both looks and feels good. It tends to give you more confidence and less concern about ‘controlling’ the instrument. On the other hand, hunching yourself over the guitar and trying to control every note makes playing an unnecessary struggle. It tends to produce a feeling of tension and a lack of confidence that reflects on your performance. In a proper position, the player is not concerned about every individual movement of the fingers, but rather is focused on the overall flow of the music. In such a dynamically relaxed position, playing becomes much easier. From the audience’s point of view, the player will appear completely in charge of the situation.
Embrace your guitar gently, like a close friend. Do not crush it up against yourself, but rather allow it to breathe and vibrate freely with full resonance. The top edge of your guitar should touch your chest, not the entire back of the instrument. A simple demonstration will show you that if you hold the back of the guitar tightly against your chest, it will dampen the vibrations, and thus the sound becomes weaker. Only the relaxed weight of your right forearm is necessary to keep the guitar from falling off your lap; there need be no extra pressing of the instrument with your right arm. Such pressure is a waste of energy and creates unneeded tension. This pressure may also force the guitar to be pulled in too much to the right, which means that the fingerboard would be pushed too far forward. This causes problems of cramping for the right arm and hand, as well as an awkward position for the left hand. It is better to have the face of the guitar either parallel to your chest or even turned slightly to the left. That allows the left hand to operate in a more relaxed way.
You need have no concern about the guitar slipping out of your grip if you are sitting properly. If you feel a need to hold the guitar very tightly, even though you seem to be sitting properly, it may be that you are overly anxious about your playing and are trying to control it too much. This difficulty may be due to a faulty right-hand technique. Many players feel that they will not be able to control the notes with the right-hand fingers if they do not hold the hand rigidly and press the guitar tightly against them with the forearm. Such problems usually disappear when the player stops trying so hard and learns how to use the right hand in a natural way. Remember that the fingers of the right hand should do most of the playing. Your arm and hand should just give quiet support to your fingers and do not need to be held rigidly in place. Some firmness of the arm and hand is all that is necessary.
