An important part of guitar is maintaining good finger dexterity. This will help you play more fluent and also help with aspects such as speed. Or even those difficult stretches.
This exercise below is a nice and simple one, which can be used as an exercise on it’s own or, how I prefer, as a good warm-up exercise to get your fingers moving. Every time I go and pick up the guitar, I STILL run through this before playing anything. (note: there are harder ones which I will cover later on)
The key point with this is to make sure that you play each note with each finger. This is what I like to call ‘finger per fret’ playing. So, everything on the first fret is played with your first finger, everything on the second fret is played with your second finger, and so on.
Also, this is to be played both ways. That means we play it going up (as in up in pitch/scale) and then play it going back down.Try just going up first. And then just down, and eventually both ways.
I cannot say it enough, but the aim is to play is SLOW and STEADY. Do not rush it, it is not a speed exercise. Also, do not look at your picking hand – you will make mistakes but your picking hand will learn to be picking the correct string in no time at all.
