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Q: Hey Joel, thank you for having such an awesome place where I can finally get questions answered instead of being referred to more lessons!

Anyway, my question is about trills; I’ve been playing/practicing for about 8-9 years, I’ve taken an abundance of lessons from different teachers and read articles including your legato article yadda yadda, but I still have a problem with my pinky.

The biggest issue is holding a note down with my index and trilling with my pinky, see:

|-3h6p3h6p3h6p3–|

I practice it very slowly and precisely, not tensing in my body whatsoever, and I usually set a timer for 5 mins, and just repeat the cycle. I’ve also practiced holding the first note with my ring finger so it’s like a trill from your 3rd to your 4th finger. All of this helps but I feel like my pinky is just tight and won’t memorize the movements to speed up on its own, and when I practice slow for awhile I start to speed it up to see what it feels like and it’s still kinda tight. I don’t know if that’s the way the pinky naturally is, but I doubt it I’ve enough player whip ass with their pinkies before hehe.

Anyway sorry for the long explanation but do you have any possibilities?

A: Dude, that sucks! This is definitely a hard one! Honestly, I would say just keep at it. You might want to find other ways at using it too. For example I always play power chords with my index and pinkie finger. Doing something simple like that will help. The muscle should/will train. You just have to untrain years of uncooperative movement out of your brain/hand. The more you use it, the better! Good luck with this!