Music

Guitar Lesson 1: Fingering Exercises of Doom

I used to give guitar lessons and I thought it was a lot of fun. I didn’t give lessons because I thought I was a good teacher, but rather because I enjoyed the instruments and I thought I could offer some different insights into the instrument that my students hadn’t already known about. Perhaps I’m assuming too much when I say that. Nevertheless, I think my students would agree that my goal was to teach them how to play what they want in the style they liked. A couple of my students really excelled at this.

One philosophy I used when I was teaching was to take the skills and techniques that I found useful in building up “chops” and applying those skills to the style of music that my student would want to know about. I’m a firm believer that you can take Chet Atkins’ chickin’ pickin’ style and apply it to all different types of music. In fact, I think I’ve found a way to incorporate hybrid picking into some of the more technical Robert Fripp 1960s/70s style of playing. That will come later.

In an effort to add more interesting content to this site, I thought I would take some of my recent and not-recent discoveries and post them online for the benefit of other guitar players. The great thing about the Internet is that people seem to enjoy sharing information. I guess that’s kind of the point of the Internet. So, let’s begin.

Difficult Fingering Exercises

Ever since I first watched John Petrucci’s Rock Discipline video, I’ve been pretty fascinated with difficult and interesting fingering exercises. Steve Vai also wrote an article many years ago about his 10-hour practicing regimen. It was filled with great fingering exercises. Here are two that I find particularly challenging:

Exercise 1
   |-----3-----2-|-----1-----4-|  e
6  |---2-----1---|---4-----3---|  B
   |-1-----4-----|-3-----2-----|  G
   |-------------|-------------|  D
8  |-------------|-------------|  A
   |-------------|-------------|  E

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

In case you can’t figure out what the 6 and the 8 are, that’s the time signature. I’ve seen some people notate tablature (incorrectly) with the high e as the bottom line, so I’ve indicated the string names on the right-hand side of the example.

The idea is to use one finger per fret (index finger in the first fret, middle in the second, ring in the third, and pinky in the fourth) and hold the notes as long as possible until you need to change positions. In other words, let all notes ring at all times. The only time a break can appear is when a note is changing on that particular string. So, as in the example above, you’d play the G# on the G string and let it ring until you played the B on the G string.

Another permutation of the above example is the following:

Exercise 2
   |-----2-----3-|-----4-----1-|  e
6  |---3-----4---|---1-----2---|  B
   |-4-----1-----|-2-----3-----|  G
   |-------------|-------------|  D
8  |-------------|-------------|  A
   |-------------|-------------|  E

Lather, Rinse, Repeat

I find this exercise to be more difficult than the first, but that might be because I thought of this one long after I thought of the first one and had time to practice. Be careful about playing this one around the house as it tends to sound very ugly and can drive your company insane.

In case you didn’t notice, these exercises are meant for playing all over the neck on all different strings. If you like, you can add string-skipping in there, you can use different picking techniques (up-down-up, down-up-down, index-middle-index-middle, etc.), you can change the note lengths and try screwing up the rhythm of the pattern even further. Again, the stranger you get, the more offensive this will sound.

Let me just warn you, these exercises may look easy, but they’re not easy to play. It may very well be easy for some of you, but I’m thinking that it probably won’t be that easy at first.

Finally, I urge you to play around with these exercises and move them around to different parts of the guitar. Here’s a video of how I play (pretty poorly, I might add) Exercise 1 on different sets of strings: