Double Your Finger Strength/Speed

hey everybody Mike here from the art of guitar I'm here to show you how to strengthen your left hand I noticed with some of my students lately when they play and let's say we're doing some kind of a pentatonic scale maybe like a hammer on type situation they'll be going like this and I just noticed their hand moves a lot when they do that I think it's because they're compensating for a lack of finger strength on the pinky and the ring finger especially so instead of having the strength to just hammer down real strong they're using the momentum of their whole hand to make that happen and that's not a good move at this point so what we want to do is we want to get each finger to be independently really strong and then whatever you want to do will require less motion less strength less hand movement and it could be all in the fingers which makes you a much more technical player which can be good so we're going to do is we're just going to do what's called the spider exercise kind of we teach that in the very beginning of our program but that's just where you do 1 2 3 4 all the way across the strings today though what we're going to do is we're just going to use a couple fingers at a time and we're going to go from the sixth string all the way to the first string so remember the sixth string is the big string okay let's go to the fifth fret of the sixth string and just play with the first finger on that note then we're going to play the next fret over with our middle finger so finger wise we're talking one two okay so we're going to go one two then on the next string one one two one two one two and I happen to be at the fifth frit position you could be third you could be really high if you want to but I really think the middle of the neck is a good place to practice this at first so let's try that real quick we're just going to go one two one two go ahead and pick everything it's okay to just do downstrokes you can also do down up Strokes okay and go one two next string one two next string next and so on now when you get to the end of that what I want you to do is not go backwards a lot of people think you're going to go two one two one backwards but don't do that go right to the second string again and go one two again third string one two fourth string one two and so on so it's kind of a good way to keep the motion happening if you go up to the top here stop and then go backwards it kind of gives you like this hky jerky motion or this weird stopping feeling I like the flow to keep happening so what we're going to do this is what I teach a lot we go to the very top and we come right back down and you can do that when you get to the bottom too you can just hit it once and come back that way you could practice in a circular motion which is a great way to keep it flowing okay so that one should be pretty obvious our first two fingers are always the strongest so keep in mind that's why we're starting there plus uh it makes sense next thing we're going to do is we're going to go to the first finger and the third finger so now we're going to be skipping a fret okay so on the sixth string we're going to go five as far as the Fret number goes and seven A and B so let's use our first finger and our third finger we're going to go all the way across the same way ready go 1 3 1 3 1 three you can go faster if you want I'm keeping it kind of slow for beginners okay but if you feel you've got it down you could you could totally go like that it's fine okay that's one three that should still feel pretty strong because your first finger is your beginning finger and then the ring finger is pretty strong too when it's uh teamed up with the first finger okay now let's go to the next obvious one it's going to be first finger pinky so it's going to be one and four so the Frets are going to be five and eight all the way across this is going to feel a little bit weird maybe if your pinky really weak but let's give it a shot ready go remember not to move your hand very much just your fingers just like that okay a lot of you are probably like oh that was pretty easy you know that's not going to strengthen my hand but we're going to add a couple things to it okay so before we add new Dynamics to it we're going to actually just switch fingers now now instead of starting with your first finger for the beginning of every part we're going to use our middle finger our second finger to start with so now we're going to go two three finger wise two3 2 three 2 3 2 three it's going to feel a little bit weird okay so I'm going to do this kind of fast but you could go as slow as you need to okay ready go 2 3 2 3 that's the 23 then all that's left is 24 for this part of it so let's go two middle finger to four our pinky okay ready go two four two four you might think this feels really weird plus your brain's reconn connecting brand new uh connections and it's probably freaking out a little bit so you might feel like you're a little uncoordinated there okay so we started on the first finger for the first group second finger for the second group and now we go to our ring finger as our starting point there's really only one thing to do with this and that's 3 four but this feels probably the most awkward okay so let's go three four all the way ready go very strange feeling there's like something that connects those two fingers so they don't want to move independently so it's a really strange sensation but try to get that down okay by now you should be starting to feel warmed up but that's not the end of the exercise there's still more now I'm not going to do them all but I want you to go through everything we just did but do hammer on instead if you don't know what hammer on are uh you could look it up we teach it on our site as well what we're going to do is we're going to start back to the first finger but we're going to go one two we're only going to pick the one and then the two is going to be a hammer on like that so do that all the way across okay then go to 1 three do the same thing then 1 14 that's a lot of fun then we go to the middle finger the second finger for our starting point now we do two three that's going to get to some people and then two [Music] four it's more common than you think to actually do that movement okay then we go to the third finger and this one you're going to feel really weak it's going to be like your St lifting weights or something it's going to not feel right for a while so that's three four doing that now the final thing you want to do I know I'm kind of rushing the end here but you get the concept is to add some trills to these now trills are just where you hammer on and pull off a whole bunch of times okay so there's really not a set amount to do you could do maybe a couple but if you want to just Trill like this see I just picked once and then I just let my left hand do the work do that all the way across okay if your hands starts to cramp up by the way be sure to stop and give it a rest okay so I want you to do these trills with all your fingers by the time you're done and you're doing three four trills it's going to be insane feeling to your hand and you're going to be like ah that kind of hurts a little bit so I suggest doing the finger yoga exercise that I talk about on the site where you do a lot of stretches and then you can also do finger splits on your leg that's where you use your leg and you sort of do these finger splits don't do them hard though be really careful because you could really hurt your hand if you go too hard some people do this I'm like oo don't do that you can do forward splits too like this this direction as well but I do the side one the most suddenly you go back and you're like wow that 3 four is a lot easier now for some reason after you do the stretch your fingers get stronger too so put all that together and see if you can develop just a crazy left hand and pretty soon doing Legato crazy fast stuff you know hamron trills all the fancy stuff is going to be a lot easier not to mention your basic chords can get stronger too because you use your pink and your ring finger a lot for everything on guitar so give your left hand a workout uh every time you practice and see what happens all right

Channel: The-Art-of-Guitar

Views: 350,086

Keywords: ultimate black belt guitar, guitar, pitchfever, pitch fever, lessons, theory, mike geronsin, beginners, advance, lesson, electric, acoustic, the art of guitar, double your finger strength

Id: 5mdaHcDTrTM

Length: 8min 41sec (521 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 04 2016