Trouble playing guitar in the day

Question

Might try here but I’m having trouble with hand sync and this is going to sound crazy but only in light or daytime… my sync seems better in darkness or completely dark and I cant seem to get that same sync when in light. I can do it under a blanket but when I’m in darkness like that my relxation my sync rhtym are all right. When I’m in the light the sync is gone and I feel tense and one or both hands feel fasterryan the other y

Answer 1

Ok, I think we've nailed down that this has nothing to do with the clock and only has to do with your ability to see. There's a joke along the lines of:

PATIENT: Doctor, it hurts when I raise my arm like this!
DOCTOR: Then don't raise your arm like that!

So if you play well when you don't look at your hands... then don't look at your hands! After all, looking at your hands is usually a beginning step, to see whether you're playing the right frets and strumming the right strings, and eventually you want to be able to play without looking. So you already can, so... congrats!

It's worth looking deeper, though. Before even talking about synchronization, let's address the fact that you feel "relaxed" in the dark and "tense" when watching your hands. Work on this physical relaxation explicitly. Tension is never on our side, long-term. Consciously work on physically relaxing. And this also suggests that you're overthinking it and adding mental anxiety. Work on mentally relaxing as well. Maybe spend some time just jamming, with absolute freedom—don't even restrict yourself to making coherent musical sounds, just move fingers and arms freely.

Now, for synchronization: To expand on a comment: Recognize that your left hand should not move at the exact same moment as your right. Think of playing, say, a third-fret note, and think of it in slow motion. At the moment the pick leaves the string, that string has to be held down by your left hand. If your left hand is late, at best you get a hammer-on or pull-off, and at worst you just get a muddy note. What are the consequences if your left hand is early? Well, if this is the first note of the song... no consequences. You could hold that fret down for minutes while you talk about the song, and then eventually hit that first note and nobody's any the wiser.

Now, if this is not the first note, then the consequence of being early is that it could mess with the previous note. Like, if the note before lasted four beats, and you moved your finger an entire beat early, then the note won't sound for that last beat. You might get a hammer-on or pull-off, if you move your left hand that way, or more likely you'd just get silence.

Here's the thing: Who the heck cares about the end of notes. Ok, I'll walk that back: Sure, if we're playing really sustained notes, it pays to think about when they end. But we cheat those endings all the time. Think in super-slow motion: If you're playing at 60bpm (one second per beat) and are supposed to play one beat of C and then switch to G... We say that the C chord lasts "for one second." But there's no way you're going to get one thousand milliseconds of C, and then move all your left hand fingers in a single millisecond. And if the act of moving your fingers has to "steal milliseconds" from somewhere, it's better to steal them from the end of the C, and be "on time" to the G, than to steal them from the beginning of the G and be late. In fact, we rarely try to play so super-duper sustained as that; sometimes we could play "staccato", where our "one beat C" actually gets muted after like 0.75 seconds or even 0.5 or 0.25, and we would still think of it as "one beat."

So, after spending some time not thinking about timing at all, to get over the overthinking... after that, I recommend practicing making your left hand changes well before the right hand action, and doing it with a rhythm. E.g., play different chords 4 beats apart, but use the last beat to change your left hand. Like "C (2, 3, change) G (2, 3, change) C..." You can start this, with a metronome, at a low bpm, and gradually increase, to practice making those changes faster. Then you could practice it with more complicated strumming patterns, making the change in the final strum (or maybe sometimes letting that strum be muted if necessary?).

Answer 2

My suspicion is that this is a matter of Circadian Rhythm, or the natural cycle of your sleep-rest-awake daily rituals and habits.

Many of us are productive in the early morning hours, long before anyone else in the house is up and about.

Others of us thrive creatively in the late evening, long after everyone else has gone to bed.

I guess what I am saying is, "It's okay". You are how you are. Embrace it. Go with it.

And more importantly, recognize this limitation (and fantastic ability) when planning and scheduling your upcoming gigs and musical performances.