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THE SOUND AND THE FURY
Kirk Hammett of Metallica

Wide-stretch licks and using your pinkie.
Dear Kirk,
Thanks a million for writing such a great column. I look forward to it every month and have learned a bunch of great stuff from it. I recently picked up the Live Shit: Binge and Purge box set and also the Cunning Stunts video and have been studying your lead playing. You use your little finger a lot and do some really cool wide stretches with your left hand. I’ve been playing for just over five years and am guilty of not using my left pinkie when I solo. If you could talk about how you use your pinkie and give us some exercises that’ll help strengthen it, and also show us a few cool, wide-stretch licks, that would rule.
—Doug Irving
Detroit, MI

Figure 1

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I’ve been using my left-hand pinkie for as long as I can remember. Back when I was first learning to play, a friend of mine said to me, "Hey, you’d better use your little finger or it’s just gonna hang out there." I heeded his advice and have used it ever since. It definitely helps me play certain wide-stretch things, and if I were a three-fingered player I probably wouldn’t be able to play things like the E minor licks shown in FIGURES 1-3. As well as sounding cool, wide-stretch lick ideas can often open up new doors in your playing because they can introduce you to intervals you don’t normally use. Doing wide stretches can also rejuvenate and breathe new life into tired old scales and fretboard patterns.

Figure 2

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Important Warning: Never attempt any wide-stretch playing ideas until you’ve warmed up your left hand thoroughly. If you go in cold, you could injure yourself. The little warm up exercise shown in FIGURE 4 is a good one for loosening up and strengthening your left hand, especially your little finger. It might seem like a piece of nothing, but if you take it from the high E string to the low E string and then back again a number of times, you’ll definitely feel it in your fingers.

Figure 3

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Once you’ve worked on FIGURE 4 for a few minutes, your left hand should be warmed up sufficiently to tackle FIGURE 5, which is a brutal trilling exercise (multiple hammer-ons and pull-offs) that my old guitar teacher and friend, Joe Satriani, showed me. It looks extremely simple but it’s actually really hard because it forces you to expand your reach. As you increase the space between your fingers it makes each trill more and more difficult. This exercise will definitely push your stretching capabilities and stamina to the max. I’ve only shown it on the high E and B strings, but you should practice this pattern on the other four strings as well.

Figure 4

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Once you’ve mastered FIGURE 5 you can try moving the exercise further down the neck (toward the nut), which will obviously make it more difficult due to the fact that the frets get further apart as you get closer to the nut. Please be sensible when doing this, though, and don’t risk hurting yourself. To be honest, I don’t do this one too often because after I do it, my left hand feels like it’s paralyzed!

Figure 5

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Once you’ve mastered FIGURES 1-3, try coming up with some wide-stretch licks and runs of your own. As my parting example, FIGURE 6, illustrates, combining wide stretches and string skipping can often result in some new and different-sounding licks. All I’ve done here is combined a five-fret stretch with a string skip; the result is a cool-sounding Am7 arpeggio (A C E G) that’ll work in just about any A minor context.
We’ll talk more about string hopping next month, see you then.

Figure 6

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