LogicalLeadGuitar.com
Newsletter #8
I've shipped out a lot of Free copies of my 101 Guitar Tips and Incredible Scale Finder books this week. Thanks for your orders!
Now Let's Play!
In my private lessons here in the Chicago 'burbs I regularly see students who don't yet have their fingers working right. If you can't do some simple exercises on the guitar fretboard, such as just walking your fingers across the neck in an orderly fashion, you certainly are not going to be able to play competent melodies or leads – and you're going to be struggling with your chord playing as well.
I routinely put myself through a regimen of fretboard exercises designed to give all of my fingers a solid workout. Here's one exercise specifically written to improve the coordination of your third and fourth fingers – since they usually are the least cooperative:
Now let's take it a step further and take a similar walk across the strings, this time using your first, third, and fourth fingers.
When I practice these patterns, I play them as you see them above, then slide up one fret and do them again. I continue this until I've played the exercises starting at every fret I can reach – obviously you'll be able to reach more frets on an electric or cutaway acoustic than a normal, full-bodied acoustic guitar. Just do what you can.
To me, these exercises are absolute essentials. And though I've been doing these exercises for about 30 years, I continue to do them weekly. They are simply the most efficient use of my time when I feel the need to get my fingers fired up.
I've often done them while watching a movie or a sporting event on TV, because, while they can get a little monotonous, they are easy enough to do without paying 100 percent attention (at least after you've done them a few times). Without any doubt, however, after I've put in an hour doing this while watching "Monday Night Football," I was absolutely tearin' it up at Tuesday night's open mic night!
These exercises are just two of the essential drills in my book "15 More Fretboard Exercises."
Can I give you a free copy of the whole book right now?
Click on the picture to see the whole book as a pdf document. You can then save it to your computer by choosing File, Save.
In the meantime…
Practice, Practice, PRACTICE!
Adam St. James
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