Stretching your hands can be a bit dangerous – I’m a piano player with smallish hands, and I’ve heard of musicians who’ve injured themselves trying to increase their hand range. One even permanently damaged his hands . . . sorry if I’m scaring you, but be caaaareful.

I used to have similar trouble with the guitar, but bought a little gadget from my local music shop that you hold in your hand, then push down on four little plastic bits. Over time, you gain a little bit more strength in your weaker fingers and it makes stretching a lot easier.

from eZine:

To improve your ability to play the guitar, you need to increase your fingers’ flexibility. To do so, you can try stretching your fingers everyday. Bend them to the point of tension, but don’t cause yourself pain! If you injure yourself, you can actually slow down your learning curve.

Also, you need to increase your hand strength. Doing so will help you hold the chords firmly, strum the strings louder, and increase your endurance. To exercise your fingers, you can try increasing your grip strength. Try squeezing a grip trainer or a tennis ball. Also, just lifting weights in general will improve your grip strength.

Finally, you need to increase your speed and finger independence. If you can train each finger to operate independently, you will have a much easier time changing chords and fingerpicking. To do so, try placing your hand flat on a table or flat surface. Raise your palms so your hands rest on their fingertips. Now try lifting and lowering each finger one at a time. Practice different patterns of doing so, and try to increase your speed ever time.

All three of these exercises will help you improve your guitar playing skills.

I would get a hand grip strengthener, so that even if you can’t fully reach all the strings, it would help to have stronger and faster fingers so maybe you can switch a little quicker. Play with a different style, sort of.

But what you may want to do is just study, study, study. Many bass lines you come across will tell you to switch from fret to fret, when you can really play the same notes on one or two strings very close to each other. It’s common with tabs that somebody will tab it out as switching string to string, fret to fret, when you can really play the same part on the first two frets using all the strings.
So you may want to look up some of the other notes that are playable too.

Being a bassist i wouldn’t direct you to ANY place other than your fret board its simple, or you could place an elastic band around your fingers and pulse . Double the band or apply more bands if it gets slack .
Also use thinner gauge string , go to a 30 or 25 for the G if you can find them .

Robert Schumann had to give up his dream of being a concert pianist because he injured his ring finger on his right hand.. He devised some sort of stretching device to give that finger more flexibility and damaged it irrevocably.

Luckily he was able to fall back on plan B and become a great composer.

Be careful about overstretching. Are you committed to the Bass rather than one of the smaller stringed instruments?

Scales, scales, scales, scales.

I find the major and minor scales particularly help stretch the fingers in the way you are interested in.

@gailcalled – Oh, don’t worry, I’m not looking to hurt myself. I’m not expecting to get my pinky too far. I’ll be happy to get a technique going that combines a bit of a stretch with being able to move my fingers quickly.

Thanks, everyone, and more suggestions are always welcome!

Money! It’s a gas..

Specific song: Longview by Green Day.

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Tho most bassist or tabbers always tab things so you don’t have to stretch very far , trick is to learn the notes and substitute a different mark on fretboard .

Also, you MAY want to considar trying out a 5-string bass guitar, because that gives you even further versatility in terms of fingering.

For example a song that is normally played around the 7th fret which has a quick jup back to an F, normally fretted on the E string first fret, can be played on the 6th fret on the B string with a 5-string.

4 and 6 strings should only be used by people who have mastered the 4 string for that very reason , it would be too much work and strain on your hands .

I disagree sandy, I think new bassists need to decide if they EVER plan on playing a 5-string, and if so, to start on a 5-string to get used to the slightly fatter neck.

And a good 5-string should not be much harder to play than a 4 string. A 5 string’s neck should not be 20% bigger…

Echoing @dverhey and @Anjohl, the best thing you can do is practice. Of course spending an hour trying to do something that’s physically impossible for you will just lead to frustration (and enough of that leads inevitably to abandoning the whole enterprise), so try this:

Move your hand up the neck until you can span four frets. Start at the octave if you want. You can skip the open notes in the piece, or, better yet, get a capo. (If your instructor doesn’t like it, fire him. On the spot. You can find a better.)

Once you master a piece, move everything back a fret and learn it again. Be patient. It will take months, if you practice every day, but you’ll be astonished at what your hands can do.* Just don’t beat your head against the wall because you can’t do it now.

(Hand exercises—not wacky contraptions, exercises—are great if for some reason you can’t play, but if you could be spending the time actually practicing, you might as well.)

Good luck. (Did I mention practice?)

* Guaranteed, or your money back!