Weekly Guitar Technique Workout – Week 3


In this week's installment of the weekly guitar technique workout series we are gonna learn a cool exercise designed to increase fret hand finger flexibility and independence.

I learned this exercise from my classical guitar instructor in Los Angeles, Grammy award winning guitarist Scott Tennant. This exercise can be found in his best selling instruction book "Pumping Nylon" which has sort of become the classical guitarist's bible over the past couple of decades.

In any case, I have adapted those exercises for pick style guitar and demonstrate them in this video lesson.

It is very important to keep the inactive fingers as relaxed as possible. I can't stress this enough, half the battle of independence of the fretting hand is keeping your hand free of tension.

This is a great exercise in developing that. That is not to say that it won't make your muscles sore because it will. But, decreasing as much tension as possible in all fingers while you are doing some of these movements is crucial.

Don't forget to "Grab The Tab" from the link below.

Week Guitar Technique Workout - Week 3 TAB PDF Download

Have fun and make sure to give your hand a break if it starts getting a bit too tired. Many times all you will need to do is just shake your hand out for 10-15 seconds for it to recover enough that you can continue practicing.

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Weekly Guitar Technique Workout - Week 3

6 Comments

  1. Marc Leone on September 6, 2013 at 6:43 am

    Great stuff; love these weekly workouts.
    Always great instruction.

    Thanks

  2. Paul on September 11, 2013 at 3:17 pm

    Superb as alwaysl, I’ve realised how uncoordinated my left hand is! Down to work..

  3. chasecar on October 14, 2013 at 4:18 pm

    I LOVE this section. Im a victim of having “too much information.” It fact, its nearing 220 Gbs of information that I couldnt get too if I started today and played 24/7 until the day I died, much less actually played it to the point of retaining it. Everytime I try to draw up a routine, its so voluminous, that it would take me two hours just to get through. These workouts REALLY help me organize my thoughts AND my practice.

  4. hank on June 6, 2014 at 2:48 pm

    could something be wrong with my third finger cause it hurts when I try and play it the way you do?

    • Carl Brown on June 7, 2014 at 9:36 am

      Hey Hank, send me a quick link to video of you playing the exercise and I will see if I can find out if your are doing something wrong. 🙂

      Carl..

  5. Gregory Zdanowicz on March 26, 2017 at 7:08 pm

    Carl, my third finger has a really hard time curling down to the B or E string. It doesn’t have a problem going up to the E or A string. Wow, I need to do some extra work for my finger.Is there a third finger exercise that I can do?

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