Learn Guitar Warm Up Exercises

Guitar warm up exercises can be extremely annoying if you approach them from the wrong angle, with the wrong attitude. And when it comes to wanting to achieve anything, attitude is everything.

 I have uploaded a guitar scale / exercise that is very useful if you need to warm up quicklly before performing or if you are just starting out, it’s good for strengthening the fingers and getting comfortable with the fretboard.

Most players have a lot of trouble using their 3rd and fourth fingers (ring and pinky) when they start out. In fact, even some  great players don’t or didn’t use their pinky.  Leslie West, the truly brilliant sounding electric guitarist that played with Mountain in the seventies didn’t use his pinky, and I read in a guitar mag a few years back that he had regretted it.  Regardless of his feelings, I and many others are quite satisied with his Nantucket Sleigh Ride.  Also, I was shocked to see Santana in the seventies play and barely use his pinky.

But, using all the fingers available on the fretting hand is a good idea.

In the exercise:  play the open string. then first fret, second fret, third fret, 4th fret and then move to the next string and repeat the sequence. You’ll notice that when you hit the 3rd string, you’ll only need to play open, one, two and three.  And then return to the previous sequence for the final string.

The secret to playing this exercise PROPERLY, is by holding down the PREVIOUS finger as long as possible.

Once you go up the neck, then play it backwards, work back down.  Where a lot of players go wrong is they try and play too fast too soon and don’t worry so much about clarity and timing

Most important RELAX your hand

 To download the printable version How to practice guitar warm ups

for more exercises go the the-guitar.net