Avoid The Left-Hand Death Grip: When you first start playing, straight away youll discover that pressing the strings against the fret is hard work, hurts your fingers and makes your wrist ache. The natural way to combat this is by hooking your thumb over the top of the fret board to get leverage, which inadvertently causes you to press the strings more with the flat pad of your finger (where your fingerprint is) rather than the actual fingertip. This is sometimes called the death grip, because you do end up with a fairly fierce grip on your neck and it …