David Randle, Music Lesson Expert

No matter what current song or technique you’re working on in your guitar lessons, behind the scenes you are training your mind, muscles, fingers, and nervous system to be a great guitar player. The happy work is learning a new tune, showing off for your friends, or jamming with other players, but the real growth as a guitar player comes from having the discipline to consistently and rigorously train your body to do the things that make a guitar player great, and do them on auto-pilot. The key here is to develop a strategy, a practicing plan, and repetitively execute that plan until your fingers know the way on their own; you choose to play something and the mind, muscles, fingers, and nervous system fire in synchronicity, almost like magic. Once that happens, your playing becomes more about the emotional content of what you’re playing than it does about the physical or mechanical part, and your guitar lessons start to pay dividends.

Guitar Lessons and Tips

In the last post, we concentrated on developing finger control using pairs of fingers. You should have gotten a good amount of control by now pairing fingers 1 and 2, 1 and 3, 1 and 4, 2 and 3, 2 and 4, and 3 and 4. In this exercise we are going to use or fingers in groups of three. Use the same approach of placing your fretting hand on a table, palm down, and while keeping the unused fingers still, execute the following patterns:

1,2, and 3
1,2, and 4
1,3, and 4
2,3, and 4

Concentrate on the hinge mechanism at the knuckle where the finger joins the hand and raise and lower each finger independently in exercise order. Musically imagine you are playing triplets instead of pairs of notes to develop a “feel” for the exercise as you perform it.

Guitar Lessons Applied

Let’s take what we’ve learned to the guitar. I want you to take the first exercise and the second exercise and place them on the guitar in the following way:

Beginning at the fifth fret and going across the strings from the sixth string to the first string and back again, dedicating the first finger to the fifth fret, the second finger to the sixth fret, the third finger to the seventh fret, and the fourth finger to the eigth fret, play each of the finger pairs, including 1 and 2, 1 and 3, 1 and 4, 2 and 3, 2 and 4, and 3 and 4. Make sure you are pressing with the tip of your fingers and playing each note as close to the fret as possible without touching it. Practice playing the pair on each string with a down and then up stroke with your pick or alternating fingers if you play finger style.

If the span of your fingers is at first too uncomfortable at the fifth fret, you may begin at the tenth fret where the frets are closer together. Get a good stretch. Eventually, you will need to be able to play this at the first fret where the fret distance is its maximum. As with any guitar lessons, be flexible enough to adapt what is being asked of you to where you are at the moment.

After becoming comfortable with playing the pairs of fingers, do the same thing with the triplets, playing across the strings and then returning to the sixth string. Play with a triplet feel. The only difference with your picking will be that as you play three notes per string in an alternating way, you will play down, up, down on the sixth string, up, down, up on the fifth string, down, up, down on the fourth string, and so on.

Make sure you use good finger pressure and are close enough to each fret. You can tell if you haven’t because you will get an undesirable buzzing sound out of your guitar. Play evenly and with control. Don’t play faster on the parts that are easy and then slow down on the parts that are more difficult.

If you own a metronome, use it, but set it at a tempo you can play at with no mistakes. Only gradually push the tempo to a faster speed as you get enough control to play with no mistakes. This is a great practice when working on any of your guitar lessons.

Good luck, and remember, there really is no replacement for face to face guitar lessons.

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David Randle, Music Lesson Expert

Guitar lessons can show you what to do, and even how to do it, but ultimately you’ve got to train your mind and body to actually do it. Unfortunately, there’s not much that we do with our hands in a normal day that provides the same dexterity training that’s required to play a stringed instrument. So we are forced to spend time practicing the finger gymnastics needed to freely express ourselves on the guitar. Time spent in guitar lessons and especially the time spent practicing everything learned in guitar lessons can go a long way to helping achieve that dream of playing whatever music in whatever style that you are hungry to express. What I want to do in this post is look at some holistic approaches to using your body that can help accelerate your develop on your instrument and get you where you want to go a lot quicker, kind of like a musical fast lane.

Guitar Lessons and Tips

One of the most important things to accomplish in the process of playing is to develop a lack of separation between your own physiology and the physical aspect of the guitar. It must feel as though the guitar and specifically the strings are extensions of your fingers. The mindset is feeling as though you and the guitar are one entity and what you think and feel somehow comes out the soundhole or through the amplifier. But most of the day the guitar sits in its case while you’re in school or at work, or out with friends, etc. So is there anything you can do while the guitar is out of your hands to further the training discipline the fingers will need to be a great player?

It is absolutely mandatory to develop complete finger independence in order to effectively play the guitar with any speed. The muscles that individually lift the fingers up and down are critical to accomplish this with any control.

Guitar Lessons and Exercises

If you lay your hands on the table in front of you with your palm down there are some exercises you can do to develop independence even without the guitar in your hands. For these exercises we are going to number the four fingers of the left hand from 1 to 4, beginning with the index finger and finishing with the pinky. We are mostly concerned with the fingers of the hand that will be fretting the guitar, which will be your left hand if you are going to play right-handed or your right hand if you’re planning on playing left-handed. While it can be important to gain independence in the picking fingers if you’ll be playing classical style, finger picking, or playing fingerstyle, it is critical to train the fretting hand.

What I want you to do is arch your fingers like you’re holding a ball, with your palm down, so that your fingertips are touching the table. Then practice raising and lowering pairs of fingers in the following pairs: 1 and 2, 1 and 3, 1 and 4, 2 and 3, 2 and 4, 3 and 4. You will be alternating your fingers, for example, raising finger 1, then lowering finger 1 while you raise finger 2, then lowering finger 2 back to the start. You should be able to do this for thirty seconds to a minute for each finger pair and you can do this multiple times throughout the day. Try to completely minimize the movement of the two fingers that aren’t involved in the moving pair. Begin slowly to master moving the two fingers at the same rate of speed, and once you’ve equalized the movement, you may go as fast as you can.

Start with this exercise, and you will begin training your fingers even when you can’t have a guitar in your hands. Stay tuned in to the blog and follow all the guitar lessons posts and I will add exercises that involve three fingers and eventually all four fingers. Remember, the more you train the fingers, you are training the muscles, nervous system and the mind.

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