Guitar Techniques: Two Handed Tapping

Just a short video on Eddie Van Halen style fingertapping. This technique can sound very impressive (when really we know that it’s nowhere near as difficult as it sounds…). Any questions, please comment below. Rob.

May 29, 2011 at 12:11 pm | Exercises | No comments

Rhythm Guitar: Strumming

So you know how to strum, right? Well, do you? Do you ever find that your strumming hand gets “out of time” or certain rhythms just feel awkward to play? It might just be that your strumming technique needs working on… I have talked about the importance of the strumming hand before, and how important [...]

May 17, 2011 at 11:00 pm | Exercises, Guitar Technique and Exercises, Rhythm Guitar | No comments

Picking Exercises 3 and 4

This next exercise uses a slightly different rhythm, the number 3 above three 8th notes (or quavers) denotes what is known as a triplet. This involves playing three notes in the space of time where you would normally play only 2- I.E. in this example you play three notes per metronome click. The term used [...]

September 17, 2010 at 7:47 pm | Exercises, Guitar Technique and Exercises | No comments

Finger Strength and Independance

This is an exercise that I use to warm-up with. I find it really helps with finger independence (getting each finger moving separately) because it forces you to produce the motion from your fingers instead of your hand (in fact, if you move your hand too much it actually makes this exercise harder to do!). [...]

May 1, 2010 at 12:00 pm | Exercises | No comments

Bass Exercise 2

The second exercise focuses more on finger dexterity in both hands.We will be walking the fingers up the neck in the fretting hand (just like in exercise 1!), but also, to make things a little more challenging, we will be walking our “plucking hand” fingers across all four strings. The above exercise can, and should, [...]

April 16, 2010 at 2:09 pm | Exercises, Guitar Technique and Exercises | No comments

Sweep Picking Part One

In this lesson, we are going to look at some simple sweeps over just 3 strings. The idea of sweep picking is that you try to change the pickstroke direction as little as possible (as opposed to alternate picking, where each note is picked in a different direction), thus we end up “sweeping” the pick [...]

March 20, 2010 at 12:00 pm | Exercises | 1 comment

Guitar Lessons: Warming Up

This is a little exercise that I use to warm up my fingers before playing. It’s great because it forces your fingers to become independent of one another, without stretching your hand too far. The exercise uses two “shapes” for your fingers (which will will later develop into four). They are: As you can see, [...]

March 18, 2010 at 12:00 pm | Exercises | No comments

Sweep Picking Part Two

Hopefully, after reading Sweep Picking Part One and trying the exercise, you now have a basic idea of what sweep picking is all about. So next, we will look at some basic shapes to get you started. Remember, each of these shapes is an arpeggio- meaning that its closely based on a chord (or, actually, [...]

March 11, 2010 at 12:00 pm | Exercises | No comments

Finger Independance (part 2)

So, if you’ve been reading this blog, you will already know how important finger independence is for your technique! You should also have realised, from playing some of the exercises on this site, that the least independent fingers are your third and fourth fingers (if you don’t believe me, try this picking exercise). This exercise [...]

March 4, 2010 at 12:00 pm | Exercises | No comments

“Pinky” Finger Strength

Many Guitarists have trouble with the co-ordination and strength of their 3rd and 4th fingers. If you find yourself in this situation, fear not! I’ve come up with some exercises to help you out. Starting with this one. The fingering underneath refers to your fretting hand fingers, and the rhythm is two notes per beat [...]

March 1, 2010 at 12:00 pm | Exercises | No comments

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