Finger Excersises

I broke my little finger in a karate competition in my early 20's, and kidded myself that this was the reason my little finger was weak when i started learning guitar.

After about 12 months i realised what a wuss i was being so virtually all the finger exercises i have done since then involve my pinky and ringer finger. It didnt take long to see big improvement in the independance of the pinky. (i could even pick my nose with it :lol: )

i find that if i fret one string with my first and middle finger, and then use my ring finger and pinky on the string above or below, in some sort of alternate picking between the two, it really helps stretch my hand out.

however, i am sure there are a bazillion "proper" finger exercises out there, i just made this up and it seemed to work for me. in fact, my little finger is now very much an "comfortable" part of my playing.

also, 1,3,4 patterns between the 2 e strings (not sure if i'd call that horzontal or vertical), in a variety of different picking patterns with a metronome really helped to strengthen that part of my hand.

like i said, this is just what worked for me, ill leave it to the experienced guys on here to give you the industry standard excersises.

good luck with it.

One that has really helped me :

Put two fingers in the B string, any two fingers, and with the other two play the G string and E string, and keep moving between G and E with these two fingers while leaving the other two fingers stationary, I find this really hard when I put my 2 and 4 fingers on the B string and try to play with the other fingers, at first it was really hard controlling my pinky to stay put, but after a day or two I could do this pretty quickly.

The other thing I do is just chromatic scales up and down the fretboard, this is more for my right hand than my left, so it can keep up with my left hand when Im doing leads.

Also I do all this on a classical guitar :) so when I use my electric I am in total control of everything.

I used to do all those annoying chromatic exercises, and still do them from time to time. Nowadays, I've been trying to work on my technique, one of the things I keep hearing is how important it is to keep the fingers close to the strings. So I've been running through a bunch of exercises like those trying to do that. I've never realised how incredibly difficult it is to keep my pinkie close to the strings when fretting with my 2nd and then 3rd finger on a string.

Thats what the excersise I do ( with the B string ) is for :D.

What I originally did to keep my fingers close to the strings was put alot of gain on my amp, put my right hand over the left hand and started doing chromatic excersises, its annoying but it works.

Thanks! I read something once about people practicing against a wall to keep their fingers close, but that seemed really odd. I'll give your idea a try.

Against a wall ??!!! :shock:

What about the guitar ??? lol

What you can also do is just play a chromatic scale really slowly, and just focus all your willpower n keeping the fingers close and not lifting them up too high after playing the note.

I used to lift off my pinky really high when I started again with the index, but now it stays just high enough so it wont hit the string, but low enough to play it again at a moments notice.