A number of researchers prefer using multi-channel surface electromyography (sEMG) pattern recognition in hand gesture recognition to increase classification accuracy. Using this method can lead to computational complexity. Hand gesture classification by employing single channel sEMG signal acquisition is quite challenging, especially for low-rate sampling frequency. In this paper, a study on the pattern recognition method for sEMG signals of nine finger movements is presented. Common surface single channel electromyography (sEMG) was used to measure five different subjects with no neurological or muscular disorder by having nine hand movements. This research had several sequential processes (i.e., feature extraction, feature reduction, and feature classification). Sixteen time-domain features were employed for feature extraction. The features were then reduced using principal component analysis (PCA) into two and three-dimensional feature space. The artificial neural network (ANN) classifier was tested on two different feature sets: (1) using all principal components obtained from PCA (PC1–PC3) and (2) using selected principal components (PC2 and PC3). The third best principal components were then used for classification using ANN. The average accuracy using all subject signals was 86.7% to discriminate the nine finger movements.