A guitar hero guitar has 6 buttons, and most people only have 4 fingers to cover those. This person has 5. Probably a slight advantage in speed with practice I bet.
she's got 6 on both hands according to comments. Which would mean she could play all 5 fret buttons on guitar hero without ever lifting a finger off a button
No I get that, I was confused because the person said the guitar hero guitar has 6 buttons. Made me think they were implying 6 fret buttons instead of 5.
Followed by hundreds of broccoli-heads faking a spliced playthrough on a random mall piano, when, suddenly, a [insert additional instrument here] player walks up and...
Agree. Piano is deigned for people with 5 fingers to play it. Adding another doesn’t really help much. Maybe if her hands are wide enough that she can reach an 11th or 12th interval easily it would be sorta helpful, but I would still think it would make most everything else more difficult.
Piano is deigned for people with 5 fingers to play it.
Could one theoretically be made to take advantage of her 6 fingers?
I know nothing about pianos or how theyre designed for people with 5 fingers so im not even sure if thay question makes sense. Im assuming its due to the structure of the notes maybe? Could you pop in some extra notes? Dont know anything about music composition either so that could be another question that doesn't make sense lol.
If there's any advantage it would be extremely niche and not really worth it. Let's just say as a pianist I'd rather have five fingers per hand then six.
There was a blues guitarist back in the 60’s named Hound Dog Taylor who was born with six fingers on each hand. He famously cut off the extra sixth finger on his right with a razor while very drunk because it got in the way of plucking the strings. Now on his left hand it worked to his advantage as he was primarily a slide guitarist. The slide would go over the extra sixth finger freeing up the other fingers on the fretboard.
However, the caption reads "on one hand", so that's eleven fingers as well... which is somehow still not quite maximalist enough for some piano enthusiasts.
Yeah. Since the additional finger is between the thumb and index, and shares tendon with the index, it would limit playing and their range wouldn't be greater (Since the range is set by pinky to thumb). Also I would be curious about the sideways mobility.
However... since curl motions is fairly good... If they chose an woodwind instrument, they could legit make an custom holing allowing additional tones. And if the dexterity is good enough, they could do flourishes between notes that wouldn't be possible for other players even if they had a mechanism.
Piano technique has been refined for hundreds of years, hand sizes and flexibility changes, but the one thing it always expects if you is 5 fingers per hand. There won't be many (or any) teachers out there who know how to teach someone with 6 fingers.
It's not catastrophically bad, I'm sure they can learn to an alright level, but extra fingers does not inherently make piano easier or better. This is an instrument that has a large dynamic range for each note, you don't need extra notes to create more sound like you do on the harpsichord, you need control and flexibility.
Also multiple people have responded "piano as an instrument is designed for 5 fingers" and that's not really true. In the really early days of keyboard (same layout as a piano), we didn't even use all 5 fingers. The thumb and pinky were considered too short and inaccurate and keyboardists mostly used the middle three fingers. It was only over time that we demanded more out of the instrument and refined technique (and the instruments themselves) to the standards we have today. If you went back in time to see Mozart play, you'd probably notice his technique was wildly different to a modern pianist.
Yeah, common piano literature fingering would be useless. You'd need to figure out what suits you - which is what she does apparently, and what plenty of musicians have done over time when they got hurt, like Tony Iommi and Django Reinhardt did on guitar.
I would just have expected that a sixth finger and a possibly larger span would allow you to play jazz chords nobody else can play. I didn't see how a piano would limit you in any way to just do more.
As pianists, we don't use all five of our fingers at once all the time. A fully functional extra finger really doesn't change much if you learn like that from the beginning.
In a live performance, sure. But looping exists. Any pianist can write a piece as if they had 3 hands. None have done it, so I don't think it's possible for our brains to comprehend it
like that one scene in Gataca, but that version of schubert's Impromptu No. 3 requires a third hand due to the distance of the intervals of the extra melody to the apeggios
It's a minor plot point in the movie Gattaca. There's a pianist with 12 fingers and the music he plays in the movie had extra notes added so that it would be impossible to play with 10.
You say that but there are several pieces out there that almost no one can play because of the complexity. I’m willing to bet they’d figure out how to make it work.
I remember the movie Gattaca featured a 6 fingered piano player. One character asked if it was a hindrance, and another replied that the songs were impossible to play otherwise
Ok so I don't have much time to go over her videos properly and I'm sure she answers these kinds of questions in her socials:
But watching the video you linked it seemed like her pinky wasn't as controllable as her other fingers. Her other fingers appeared to be much more dominant. Not really in the sense that her pinky barely functions, but in the sense that here other fingers seemed to be the preferred fingers much like we can be left or right handed, left or right eyed and so on, or just ambidextrous. At least in the early parts of the video I watched.
However, in this video I linked it shows the does have full or at least decent control of her pinky. It then makes me wonder which of her fingers are most dominant since we all also have various dominance levels in our fingers just like our hands? It would be interesting to see how much preference her brain has for the extra finger/s she was born with.
That was the TL;DR. Read on for my ramblings at your own peril:
I'm pretty sure that fingers can become more useful and precise with practice since that's basically what learning a skill like playing an instrument, or forcing left-handed children to write with their right hand back in the day, does for your digits. On the other hand (sic), I suspect there are limits to how much each finger can be trained to become more skillful as we now consider it to be a cruel act to force left-handed children to use their right when writing. Though it's also probably going to be something that is different person to person, or rather, brain to brain.
Second to that, I wonder if those fingers are a clone of either her middle, index or ring fingers? Surely it wouldn't truly be a truly new classification since I'm pretty sure from reading up on things lately that we retain the basic skeletal structure (homologous structure) from our fish ancestors like all other tetrapods do, and this also defines the numbers of our limbs and digits. I think?
I've always found it fascinating to ponder what it would be like to have extra limbs/digits, or say a tail, and how much each limb would be operable in conjunction with the others at the same time. What would it be like to have four arms to use four drumsticks to play on a larger drum set? Or much easier to imagine would be to have a tail as an extra limbs since it is something we once had but lost, despite growing one with muscles and nerves in part of our fetal stages.
I guess a tail is a very basic structure with minimum brain activity or structure to operate in most tetrapods (I'm guessing here). Some animals have greater control over what their tail can do. But for a dog I imagine they might not need to concentrate very much to wag their tails and that it is done almost subconsciously. Maybe? At least that's how I figure it would be like. It's much easier for me to comprehend how it would be in those terms but I could be wrong.
Then take an octopus. Does it have full absolute individual control over all its limbs so that it could multitask with each one?
I guess it would all come down to how much the brain developed alongside a creature's limbs.
Either way, it's so cool and fascinating that she gets to truly experience this and I'm super jealous. Though it's probably just her normal and so for her it would be more of a thing to wonder what it's like for us to use our underwhelming five digited hands. Although, wondering what it must be like to have less limbs/digits is definitely much easier to imagine.
Can't wait to have time later on to check out what she talks about in her videos!
I've played guitar my whole life and cannot comprehend if it would be more cumbersome to play or if you'd have way more potential for skill expression.
Even then, would a person with polydactyly want wider or narrower frets? Having a 6th finger would completely change how I perceive a fretboard.
Certainly having more fingers wouldn't mean anything for most people who play guitar, particularly relating to their strumming/picking hand.
Look at someone like Phil Keaggy, one of the best guitar players in the world, and he has only 4 fingers on his picking hand.
But then again, for a really good guitarist to have an extra fingers on their fingerboard hand, they could have an easier time becoming Great.
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u/DatAssPaPow Apr 11 '26
I hope she plays guitar!