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Guitar Exercises - Strength and Speed

This guitar lesson will show you six important guitar exercises which will improve many aspects of your technique. Developing good guitar technique is a must if you want to play riffs, songs, or solos at different speeds!

Practicing guitar exercises is like eating healthy! Just listen to Blink 182's 'What's My Age Again', Jimmy Eat World's 'The Middle', and Led Zeppelin's 'Heartbreaker' and you'll get the picture. Speed isn't everything. Accuracy and consistency are BIG!

Let's start with a couple of basic guitar exercises that I find very useful for building accuracy, consistency, and speed.

Pick Speed Exercises

If you haven't taken our technique basics lesson yet, do so now to learn about the correct right and left hand positions. When using alternating picking, it is very important to keep the guitar pick at a right angle to the strings. Also, the pick should not rest on the string next to the one that you are picking. Here's a guitar exercise to practice this:

Alternating Guitar Exercise 1

Think about your guitar pick making a U shape (pick the string, pick comes out of strings, pick the string, etc...) Practice this exercise on all strings!! Practice this exercise using palm muting! When comfortable, practice this exercise with the metronome.

You've probably picked scales using alternating picking, but here's a refresher. Try Alternating exercise 2 and 3 below:

These guitar exercises are derived from the E Blues Scale. Review the E Blues Scale if you need to.

Think about your pick making a U shape (pick the string, pick comes out of strings, pick the string, etc...) Practice these exercises on all scales!! Practice these exercises using palm muting! When comfortable, practice these exercises with the metronome.

 

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Finger Strength Exercises

Finger Strength Exercise 1 (First to Sixth String)

1. Play this exercise at the 5th fret
2. Play each note on the first string, leaving all fingers on.
3. Play the 5th fret/2nd string while keeping the other 3 fingers on the 1st string.
4. Play the 6th fret/2nd string while keeping the other 2 fingers on the 1st string.
5. Keep this pattern until all fingers are on the 2nd string!

Repeat these steps for every other string!

Finger Strength Exercise 1 (Sixth to First String)

2. Play each note on sixth string (starting from the 5th fret), leaving all fingers on.
3. Play the 5th fret/5th string while keeping the other 3 fingers on the 6th string.
4. Play the 6th fret/5th string while keeping the other 2 fingers on the 6th string.
5. Keep this pattern until all fingers are on the 5th string!

Repeat these steps for every other string!

1. Keep these groups of frets down when you play them: 567, 5678, 5678, etc..

Finger Strength Exercise 2 (sixth to first string)
(HEAR IT!)

Think about your pick making a U shape (pick the string, pick comes out of strings, pick the string, etc...) Practice these exercises first with down picking then alternating. Practice these exercises using palm muting! When comfortable, practice these exercises with the metronome.