Hello Karolina! I definitely see what you’re talking about with your pinky. When you don’t use it, it’s like way out in no-man’s land. I would strongly suggest you practicing your scale patterns. I know you may practice your scales, but do you really PRACTICE them? The reason why your pinky flies off the neck is because the nerve connection between the ring and pinky fingers are too dependent on each other. Your pinky sticks out and extends and flexes because it knows the ring finger is doing SOMETHING, but it’s not doing ANYTHING, so it extends and flexes because muscularly, it’s what it’s trained to do. “Oh, ring finger is doing something, i have to be READY and ENGAGED to do something.” Practice your scale patters keeping the largest middle knuckle of your pinky finger BENT and keep all your fingers curled like you’re almost trying to hold a small golf ball. You are also more than welcome to scan my riff page for my finger exercise that’s geared JUST for the pinky and this specific problem! Several students have loved it so far.
As far as your second concern, it takes time. You have to play a song long enough to get the timing down. And it takes HOURS and DAYS of practice to do this. What you want to do, is in the beginning listen to where the downbeat of the singer’s melody is. Like
“SEIZE the DAY or DIE regRETTING the TIME you lost.”
“Hate to TWIST your MIND, but GOD ain’t on your SIDE.”
The words in all caps are where Shads (just using him as an example) sings a word on the downbeat of a song. You can hear a certain emphasis on counts where a singer has his melody. Sometimes it’s the whole word, sometimes it’s only a part of the word. But you can in the beginning listen to the beat that the singer is doing and try to find the downbeats of the melody. If that’s hard to understand, I’ll make a video to go into further detail
hope that helps!
