Essential Guitar Warm-Up Exercises – Premier Guitar

warm-up routine

Below are 10 specific exercises for both hands that focus on picking. If you play at the tempo, it will take about 5 minutes. I’m ready to play just about anything and still have the energy left to focus on gigs. The idea is to allow you to practice techniques that exceed the demands of what you play.

direction: All exercises except sweep picking use alternate picking. Be careful of picking, which is important for polishing your monster technique. Play all the notes evenly and cleanly at a slow tempo, then gradually speed up.

Yuan. 1 Probably the exercise I despise the most. It was shown to me by a guitar genius/grad school colleague. He played fast with no errors, clinks or hesitation. He was an angular sound, something he had never heard before, which intrigued him. What makes it difficult is that he picks each string alternately, using only one note per string.

Start with one finger per fret, from strings 6 to 3. Then fingering down to the next his 4th string starting on the 5th string. Keep moving the shape until you run out of strings. The pattern on the left would be 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3, 1-2, 1. At this point, move down. Fret and invert the shape starting from the 1st string. Continue doing this until you reach the 1st fret. It’s hard to play cleanly, but the sound is cool and it’s a necessary technique.

Yuan. 2 The difficulty of playing the guitar is condensed into one line. It focuses on string crossing and pick direction. Note the extra notes added to the pattern. It provides an opportunity to change the picking direction and start the phrase with an upstroke. I found that the picking didn’t work well when the pattern changed. This is a good example of overcoming this technical challenge.

Here are the most basic and traditional forms of the major scale. Yuan. 3What makes this difficult is the combination of alternately picking 2 and 3 notes per string. It strays from the predictable flow of sound string by string. Play this 4 times to train your picking hand and bring down this skill accurately.

So you say you know the major scale? This might be one of the most difficult things he has.premise in Yuan. Four Access all notes and scales anywhere on the neck without having to transition to more comfortable fingerings. When you’re playing chord changes and ideas, you want to be able to play the next note within reach. Thinking stops and creativity is often stunted at the moment you have to shift to play a line.

This may even be more of a mental exercise than a physical exercise. Several items must be tracked at the same time: moving all keys in a cycle of four degrees and moving in the direction of the scale. , to find the note in the correct position. All of this is (ultimately) at racing pace.

Play the major scale at the same position without shifting. The goal is to play across the span of the 4th and 5th frets without using an open string. This exercise has his four directions: up, down, alternating up and down, and alternating up and down.

This is a quasi-classical guitar passage in which the fingers of the right hand work (Yuan. Five). Specifically, the pedal point exercise where one note remains the same while the other note moves. Make the alternating picking technique with the triplet part really work.

Yuan. 6 It is played before the performance. When I started performing on Broadway, I realized the involvement and demand for my right hand. Fast picking is determined by tremolo technique, so I wrote his part tremolo into the arpeggio in G minor leading up to a Bach excerpt (1st Violin Sonata BWV 1001 Presto).

Yuan. 7 It’s all about pentatonic quintuplets. Note that for each starting note of a five-note group, the pick direction is opposite to the previous one. Like Eric Johnson, it sounds great when played fast.

Chromatic scale is probably where everyone is already warming up. but, Yuan. 8 It uses an open string combined with a fretted note in the first position, which is a challenge. This may be on par with something from Mel Bay Book 1, but try playing it fast and clean.

To play modern ideas on guitar, you need to know sweep picking. Because sweeps use different muscles, you will feel discomfort and differences at first. Starting slowly with triplets, in the same note pattern he plays sixteenth notes, followed by him playing quintuplets. Yuan. 9 Useful for both picking and rhythmic control.

Yuan. Ten Break out of narrow scale step intervals and branch out into wider intervals such as 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, etc. Techniques include skipping strings and various shapes. Interval training is a great ear workout and should be done daily just like taking vitamins.

We hope this warm-up routine will give you new heightened technique and success in your playing. Until next time, happy shredders and travel!