20Minutesto…betterfingerdexterity
Improve your playing with four exercises designed to tighten up both your fretting skills and picking technique
Developing your fretting skills is part of a bigger picture of simultaneously improving your picking technique. As you gain better coordination you’ll greatly improve your overall speed, accuracy and fluidity – whatever style of music you play, rhythm or lead. It’s mostly about training your fretting fingers to move at a consistent speed, as most mistakes occur due to small inaccuracies between pick and fret hand – this can lead to ‘stumbling’ or rhythmic stutters. Even in the fret hand itself, guitarists often favour the first three fingers and find they neglect the weaker fourth digit.
If this sounds familiar, then this month’s exercises are for you. Each is designed to target the fret-hand fingers in a variety of ways, as it’s important not to simply repeat the same exercise. Speed isn’t necessarily the target, although this can come as your playing progresses. Just make sure everything sounds clean, whatever speed you decide to play at.
Practice Plan
1. Two minutes: Play through one exercise slowly
2. Three minutes: Experiment and improvise with the ideas over the backing track 3. Try the other examples
Once you’ve tried the tab exercises, try moving them to another area of the fretboard to see how they sound at a higher or lower pitch and how they feel played with different fret spacing. Playing in every possible fretboard position is the key to unlocking your potential when it comes to fretting skills. You’ll need to think creatively with the first exercise though – the open sixth string may be tough to transpose.