superglued fingers... help!

Japanese Sandman · June 2011

I'm a fan of FastFret to deal with situations like these. I use to get terribly nervous when playing and my hands would go from ice cold (very crippling) and then to sweats. After a few minutes of hand sweats the strings would be difficult to deal with and at that point fast fret was helpful. The long term solution is to just play in front of people as much as possible. When you get to the point where you are distracted by the sports scores on the bar TV while into you third chorus of Minor Swing you know you have finally overcome the anxiety! At that point you have to start working on your concentration skills!

Jeffrey van Gils · August 2011

Now, I'm not a doctor. Not even a medical enthousiast - I steer away from that kind whenever I can.

But I once knew someone that had massive sweatpits onder her arms. And she had it taken care of with a surgical solution. So who knows, perhaps a simple surgical solution is available.

Avalon · August 2022

I have the sticky hand problem and recently began playing gypsy jazz. I bought my first Selmer style guitar just a couple weeks ago!

When playing arch top I solved the sticky hands problem entirely to my satisfaction by putting flatwound strings on my axe. This is not a good choice for a Selmer axe because the sound of the instrument dramatically changes with flatwounds.

For me the stickiness translates into a friction problem. What I have done to dramatically decrease the friction of string against finger is address the finger side of the problem. I took a look at my fingers and realized that the finger tip calluses were a big source of the friction. So I used one of those callus smoothing tools you can get at the drug store and some very fine sand paper to smooth my finger tips. You can easily do this without damaging the necessary callus.

I now do a daily 5 minute finger smoothing routine that gives me the same finger tip smoothness on the left hand as the right (right hand player). This has worked very well. I would still like to make further improvements but this has been a big deal for my left hand.