This article is written by Toru Hoshino, a jazz bassist and instructor based in Japan who teaches online lessons to students worldwide. In this article, he shares a simple way to stop your left-hand thumb from hurting when you practice.
If you’ve been teaching yourself bass and you’ve noticed “my left thumb has been hurting lately,” try the approach in this article.
Contents
Why Your Left-Hand Thumb Starts Hurting
A common cause of thumb pain is practicing with a grip where you’re really pressing hard into the back of the neck with your thumb.
First off — if it already hurts, it’s fine to take a few days off from practicing. Don’t push through pain. That’s never worth it.
Once you’ve rested properly and you feel like the pain is starting to ease up, try this exercise: play with your thumb lifted off the neck entirely.
Practice Playing With Your Thumb Off the Neck
Try lifting your left thumb completely off the neck and playing do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do.
It’ll feel really awkward at first. But you’ll find you can actually do it — barely!
After playing through do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do a few times with your thumb lifted off, bring your thumb back — but this time, just rest it lightly against the back of the neck instead of pressing into it.
Once you do that, you’ll find you can play through the same do-re-mi-fa-so-la-ti-do smoothly and lightly, without needing to dig your thumb into the back of the neck at all.
The whole point of this exercise is to first feel that instability of playing with no thumb support, so that when you bring your thumb back in lightly, you really notice just how stable your hand can be with barely any thumb pressure at all.
This is a lot easier to follow by watching it than reading about it, so I made a video covering everything above.
Want Personalized Feedback on Your Playing?
Whether you’re actually gripping too hard without realizing it is something that’s genuinely difficult to judge on your own — it’s exactly the kind of habit a second pair of eyes catches instantly.
This is exactly the kind of thing that’s hard to fix alone — and where having a teacher makes all the difference.
At Line on Bass, I offer an online lesson service where you send me a video of your playing, and I give you specific, detailed feedback — every single day if you want.
Students from around the world are using this to fix exactly these kinds of issues and steadily improve their jazz bass skills.