Goals. Over the years there have been times when I could play more and times when I could play less, and even some days when I didn't play at all. Any of that could have left me frustrated and even ready to quit the guitar. I wish I'd had a chart of exercises for the fingers and the pick so I could maintain whatever technical level I was at, and one that didn't take excessive time to practice. So I rolled up my sleeves and worked out a way to build that chart, which I'll start laying out here.
I'm going to begin with a series of chromatic exercises that will warm up the fingers of the fretting hand and, at the same time, build up your picking power. Below you'll also find links to the other three chapters that complete this topic.
- Developing Your Technique I
- Developing Your Technique II
- Developing Your Technique III
- Developing Your Technique IV
There's no set duration for these exercises for players just starting out, but you should practice them once a day at the very least, for a minimum of half an hour. More experienced players won't need to do them every day, but should work them in several times a week since, as I said, the goal is to avoid losing playing level.
Before You Start
In this exercise, as in all the others, you need to take great care of your fingers and hands. Never let any pain develop. At the slightest discomfort, stop playing and relax your hands and fingers: flex the fingers loosely, open and close your hand to release all tension. Especially for beginners: if you're relaxed again you can continue, but if the discomfort or pain persists, stop playing for a few hours, or even for the rest of the day if necessary.
ISP Música brings you a video from the author of this article, Alberto González
Another important point is to use a metronome for every exercise. Without it, you won't be able to play them correctly. In the scores you'll see a tempo that I've found to be the most suitable for practicing them, but if that feels too fast, set your metronome slower and start at a gentler pace; once you can play the exercise cleanly, bring the tempo up.
Another important thing: if you're going to practice with some saturation (distortion), you should mute the strings so that each note sounds clean and distinct. In other words, two notes should never ring at the same time. To do this, use the heel of your picking hand (I don't say right hand, since it depends on whether you play right- or left-handed) and rest that part of your hand on the strings just past the bridge. This way you'll get used to achieving maximum clarity in your execution of the exercises.
Chromatic Exercise
Let's start with a classic chromatic scale exercise, ideal for warming up the fretting hand and for alternate picking. Practice it as shown in Figure 1 and, once it comes out well, play it a second time at double speed in sixteenth notes. Figure 1.
That's an exercise you've surely practiced at some point (especially early in your guitar journey), but as you know, an exercise isn't only for beginners. In this case it will be very useful for everything I've already explained (if you've been playing for a while, it works as a warm-up). This is where you should feel the fingers of your fretting hand loosen up, ready to move on to the next exercise.
Pentatonic Exercise
Now on to the second exercise, in which we'll work alternate picking on a pentatonic scale. The exercise uses an A minor pentatonic scale, and we'll play four alternate-picked strokes per note. You'll also need to practice it at least twice. Figure 2.
As you'll have noticed, the real effort in this exercise lies in the picking hand and in controlling the change every four strokes per note.
Five-Note Chromatic Exercise
In the next exercise we keep stressing chromatic scales and alternate picking, to make sure our fingers are ready to continue with our session, whether that's a gig, a recording, a rehearsal, and so on. This next exercise is a little more "tangled" than the previous ones, but it will be one of the most important for our goal, and over time it may even become the only one you need to warm up your fingers or recover your level after a few days without playing.
To start, we'll play it twice in a row, and you'll probably realize its value quickly and it will become one of your go-to guitar exercises. Figure 3.
As you'll have noticed, we're building a series of exercises whose goal is to play four alternate-picked strokes per string, except in Figure 3. Besides the difficulty for the fretting hand because of the string changes, it also forces us to memorize more demanding finger movements in that hand. That way we start learning exercises of a certain difficulty, which is quite important down the road: getting used to this, to memorizing.
So, to sum up, we've worked the pick and the fingers in a way that will go a long way toward having them ready for a warm-up or for maintaining your level.
For the next installment, here's a preview of an exercise that changes the four notes per string to three. We keep working on alternate picking, and you should try it out to get a sense of what's coming, since the new element will be tackling modal scales of different types and in different ways.
The exercise we're going to play is in the key of B-flat major, and we'll use its Ionian scale, which corresponds to its first degree (it doesn't matter if you don't know the scale, since the staff shows you where to finger it, and keep in mind that we're on the technical side of the guitar). We'll play it ascending and descending, once again with alternate picking, using three notes per string. Let's get familiar with it now, since we'll use it in the future as a model for other exercises. We'll run this exercise at least four times in a row without stopping (but, as I said before, pace your effort).
If you didn't know the scale, now you have another one to practice and explore. In the next installment, in addition to this, I'll give you a series of exercises for working on ascending/descending patterns and building speed in scale execution, and we'll include a complete chart of the major scale laid out across the whole neck in a special way so you can move around it without problems.
Best to all, and see you in the next installment.
