Fingerweights

What in the world are "Fingerweights?"

Andy Schneider of Digital Take Video recently sent these things to me to try out. Andy is a professional videographer whom I had met last year while working a wedding together. Since then, he's taken my photography workshop and has kept in contact with me over the year.

He recently shot a video for the makers of this product and they gave him a set of the weights which he passed on to me. Andy reads my blog and he remembered that I play guitar, so he thought I could benefit from these.

Initially, I admit that I thought these things were really a joke. After all, they clip onto your fingers and the weights look like steel versions of fuses! But after trying them for the past few days, I have to say I really like them! It's not easy exercising your fingers with these on. The idea of course is to add resistance to your playing so that when you don't have them on, you can play your instrument a lot faster.

Before I had the Fingerweights, I was using the device pictured below the Fingerweights. The Gripmaster is a hand exerciser with individual springs per finger. I've had this one for at least 10 years. This particular one is the medium tension version... but they might as well have been called heavy tension because it's not easy to push down on this thing! I probably should have purchased the light tension version, but being the macho guy I thought I was, I figured I'd go one step up. Wrong...

Hard-core guitarists like me buy all sorts of stuff to try to improve. This is a prime example of what sorts of things we get into...