By Jaime Villarreal
It is important to develop fingering strength and speed. If a guitar player is expecting to advance in range and technical difficulty it is vital. An ear for music, and the dedication spending hours improving your art is crucial, but without good fingering technique, you won’t advance to meet your potential.
To advance and improve difficult technique, one must know their current abilities in order to push them to the next stage. For those that want to move forward to the next level find a quality mentor that’s above you who can pin point your weaknesses and build your strengths. Challenging yourself doesn’t simply mean you will be playing harder songs or trying to play faster solos. Speed is a byproduct of lots of practice. You need to build finger control and carry out precise movements that can only be learned at slow speeds and patience. Once your fingers start getting used to the guitar, you’ll speed up naturally, without even trying. One of the most important things you need to understand is that playing slowly but correctly is much more important than playing fast but sloppy, it is ok to start off sloppy but it’s about improving yourself. If you are a Metal guitarist in a band, or you are a student who likes to play guitar in church every week, improving your skills is vital to any guitarist’s hopes of reaching their own potential greatness. Just remember that skill level is irrelevant, as all student types are capable of developing.
There are guitar exercises you can apply to strengthen those fingers while improving technique and speed. Most commonly used is the chromatic 1-2-3-4 exercise with alternate picking. The problem is the finger movement goes one direction making it difficult to break away from a single motion. This is fine for warming up and syncing both hands.
- Start alternate picking first note pick down and second picking up etc.
This is a twister but it will help with licks. It will also help you break away and explore across the fretboard. Also, it improves on technique have advanced flexibility. It even builds dexterity confidence that is required to play the guitar well. This is just one of many exercises for your fingers. I recommend doing this for 5 to 10min. Try challenging yourself by increasing speed every few days. If you feel you have hit a tipping point slowdown just enough where you feel comfortable. Once you have it down go ahead and increase the bpm, give yourself a bit of a challenge each day.
In order to improve as a guitarist, exercising your hand and fingers is crucial. By keeping your fingers strong and flexible, you will be mastering those complex scales and licks in no time.