Very important. Many guitarists, I might go so far as to say most, use far too much brute power with their left hands in mashing down the strings. Much too much tension. This can really inhibit the left hand and slow you down.

You might be somewhat amazed at how little pressure it actually takes to fret a string, even with steel strings. Try fretting a string this way:   touch the string just behind the fret as usual, but don't press it down. Play the string with the right hand. You should get a sort of dead "thubb" sound. Keep plucking the string, and gradually increase the pressure until the string lightly contacts the fret, and continuing plucking the string and increasing the pressure with your left hand finger until the tone becomes clear. Once it's clear, don't increase the pressure any more. That's it. That's all you need. Much less than you might think. Probably very much less that you've been using up 'til now.

Try to feel the tension drain out of your fingers. Keep them relaxed almost to the point of being floppy. Then use only as much pressure as is absolutely necessary to get a clear sound out of the string. And when you lift a finger to move it somewhere else, let the tension drain out of it until you actually need to apply pressure again.

It will take a bit of practice (Oh, horrors! That word again!) to get the feel of this, but it will really be worth it to not work so hard. This is the key to being "light-fingered" and fast on a guitar fingerboard.

Don Firth

P. S. Just for your amusement and amazement. Be sure to scroll down past the picture of Richard Yates clowning it up and take a look at the photo of Ida Presti doing the stretch for real. I met her once when she and her husband, Alexandre Lagoya, were in Seattle on a concert tour. She was a fairly small woman, about five foot three or so, and her hands were not all that big. Twang!