The Best Guitar Exercises For Improving Your Speed and Picking Technique

As a guitar player it is very important to practice a variety of exercises. These can include scales, chords and rhythm work. These are the basic building blocks of any musical endeavor. Practicing these daily will help you become a more well rounded and proficient guitarist.

Many new players get caught up on trying to play faster than their peers. This is fine, but it should never be at the expense of playing clean and tight. The best guitarists like Stevie Ray Vaughan, Gary Moore and others sound amazing because they never sacrifice precision for speed. So don’t try to out play everyone else, just focus on making progress and eventually you will be playing fast and clean.

One of the best exercises for improving your picking technique and finger indepedence is a simple exercise called the Caterpillar. This involves alternating up and down strokes with your pick. This helps develop your picking accuracy and also improves the synchronization between your left and right hand. It is a great exercise to do before trying any other more complex fingering patterns.

Another good exercise is the Fretboard Interval Exercise. This is a very cool exercise that will help you learn the interval relationships on the fretboard. The idea is to take a note (for example C) and then try to find all of the other notes that can be played on the fretboard that have the same interval as this one. This will be very difficult at first but over time will build up a very useful visual memory of the fretboard that will help you when you are composing or writing songs.

String skipping is another great exercise that is very beneficial for developing your fretboard knowledge and improving your speed. This is an exercise that should be done slowly at first and then gradually paced up over the course of a week until you can comfortably play it in time with a metronome. It is very important to do this exercise correctly because the last thing you want to do is hurt your fingers or stress your wrists and elbows.

Finally, the hammer on/pull off exercise is an excellent exercise to improve your fretboard awareness and increase your speed. This is an exercise that requires you to hammer on a string and then pull it off quickly over and over again. This will also require a lot of strength in your fretting hand and will build up the muscles in that area. This is an exercise that should be done carefully because it will hurt your hand at first but over the course of a week should build up muscle memory and will not cause any serious harm to your finger or arm joints.

As you can see there are plenty of great and easy to do guitar exercises that can really help improve all aspects of your playing. Try to find a few that you like and mold them into your own routine. Most importantly just have fun and make sure you always focus on proper technique, not just speed.