Hopefully you’ve already invested some time working on the exercise from the first guitar finger training lesson. As you probably remember, the exercise in that lesson was designed to improve your technique with the following three finger pairs…
- Fingers 1 and 2
- Fingers 1 and 3
- Fingers 1 and 4
What we’re going to do in this lesson is look at a new exercise that will help develop the remaining three finger pairs…
- Fingers 2 and 3
- Fingers 2 and 4
- Fingers 3 and 4
Let’s jump right in with the exercise…
Guitar Finger Training Exercise 2: Practice For Five Minutes
This finger training exercise is more advanced that the first one because, in my opinion, the finger pairs being used are a quite bit more awkward to play. The exercise also uses the dreaded 3 and 4 finger pair, which for many players is a particularly challenging one to master. So, if you find it tricky, you can sleep well knowing that many others are in the same boat as you! 🙂
Practice Recommendations
All the practice recommendations from the first lesson also apply to this lesson. But there are a couple of other details that I’d like you to focus on…
- Keep your first finger lightly touching the string at all times. As you play the exercise, don’t allow your first finger to lose contact with the string. This will help train it to remain still, and not waggle about when the others are playing. It will also help train your first finger to stay very close to the string at all times. And this will make it easier for you to play fast later on.
- When playing the finger pair 3 and 4, keep your first finger and second finger lightly touching the string at all times. Do your best not to allow them to come off the string.
These instructions are quite hard to explain with text, so I really recommend taking the time now to watch this video…
I think it would be a great idea to take both the exercises and turn them into a fretting-hand workout that you do at least a few times a week. Here’s an example of what you could do…
- Practice Finger Training Exercise 1 for 5-minutes.
- Rest for 2-minutes.
- Practice Finger Training Exercise 2 for 5-minutes.
A Few Last Words
Practising these exercises on a regular basis will do wonders for your fretting-hand technique, especially if you follow all of the practice recommendations. It’s also important to mention that how much work you do on them will depend entirely on your goals. If you have no desire to play fast, then you probably don’t need to work on them that much. On the other hand, if one of your lifetime goals is to learn to play really fast, then I recommend taking the practice of the exercises very seriously.
Good luck!
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