Don’t Stop Believing Help

[remsreef]

Hi Andrew,

I’ve been working on Don’t Stop Believing and I’m having trouble with measure 29. The hammer on pull off with the pinky. As soon as I use my ring finger on the 7th fret of A, and try to use my pinky to hammer pull off on the 8th, I just can’t do it or get a good tone. If anything, my A string slips off of the fretboard.

Any advice on how I can strengthen my pinky finger and any tips on measure 29? Thanks!

Dan

[awesomestrings]

String slipping problem:
To be honest, I just finish that song, and for me, it took around 5 days to make my index finer strong enough to hold all three strings during the pull off. You shouldn’t focus too much on that part, but go ahead and learn the other piece in that song. Increase strength in your index day by day, so once you mastered that, you have finished the whole song.

Here’s a guide to hammer-ons and pull-offs, if you haven’t seen it.

Barre Chords: An Introduction

Pinky Problem:

With the pinky, I too had the same problem, and since my uke doesn’t have a pickup you can barely hear it when the room is quiet. All I kept on doing, was practice basically and teaching my pinky finger to work like my other fingers as well. Keep Trying! 🙂

Hammer on’s and Pull off’s from this site: Trying doing it with all your fingers if you want.

Technique Lesson: Hammer-Ons & Pull-Offs

This might not be the help you wanted, so I apologize and I hope Andrew respond to your question.

[Andrew]

Great tips, awesomestrings! I’d like to add that the pinky is generally our weakest finger, so you would want to work on developing strength in it. In our second lightning round video, I highlighted a great exercise for doing just that. I’ll link the video below (starting at that question). You can go a step further with that exercise and incorporate hammer-ons and pull-offs.

In regards to that bar, make sure that you have proper left hand form, which is highlighted as form 3 (barre chords). And last but not least, if you need to review the fundamentals of hammer-ons and pull-offs, check out this lesson.

Give these a shot and let us know how it goes. If you still have issues, feel free to post a video and I’d be happy to further help.

[curlyuke]

That was nice of you, I found it useful too. Thanks ☺

[Author]

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