I don't have big hands. My hand span and finger stretch isn't great.
When I started out playing guitar it was ok when I was playing regular open cowboy chords, (The C chord was a struggle at first If I'm honest). When it came to barre chords and chords that took wider stretches I got irritated and frustrated at my meager hand anatomy. If I didn't find so much comfort and solace in playing guitar I might have given up...

While in my local guitar store, (which was like church to me!) one of the regular customers showed me a cool trick to find the same notes on different strings. This AHA moment made me realise that I didn't have to stretch and endure pain to get the sounds I wanted out of the guitar. I could re-engineer the chords for my hands!

Then I thought...can I do this with scales? Yes...
What about with arpeggios? Yes!

After over 30 years of teaching guitar I think one of the biggest flaws in guitar education is the cookie cutter methods that we've inherited assume all guitar players have instant total control of their hands. Yes. I know if it's worked in the past it will work again for some people, but not all people. The old school methods aren't always the easiest and fastest way if your hands don't want to comply with your brain!

Back to my AHA moment... Now I'm a blues guy. That's the music that struck me like lightning when I first heard it. I needed to make those sounds! My hands however didn't want to play. I struggled with a simple blues shuffle rhythm. I didn't want to cheat, so I pushed until it hurt.

But what if I did cheat? Other guitar players will ALWAYS be the first to tell you "you're doing it wrong". But...Like I always say, "If it works. It's not stupid...or wrong!

One fun and kind of expected part of learning guitar is to be able to "JAM" with other musicians. I remember my first Jam. It was the 12 bar blues shuffle... I had conquered it in the key of A but that was all I could do. Then it happened. The bass player said " Blues in E". That meant I had to stretch for the B chord. I fluffed and floundered and could feel my embarrassment rise as every time that B chord came around I dropped the ball... I couldn't jam! I realised I didn't have what it took to keep the music going.

When I got home from the jam session I was feeling extremely deflated. When I playing in the comfortable key of A It was pure elation and joy because I was part of the band!
But that B chord...man...that was horrific.

I knew I had to get good at that bloody B chord in time for the next jam with my buddies.
If at first you don't succeed. Cheat. I knew how to find notes on other strings from what my guitar store buddy had taught me. Could I "cheat" and do it with the B chord and save myself from embarrassment at the jam session next week?

It was slow and took a while, but with pen and several sheets of paper I plotted out a fretboard and figured out a way to avoid the dreadful B chord stretch. I realised I needed to understand my fretboard to unlock all the cheats. I also realised I needed to engineer the fretboard around my hands and not the other way around.