Musical Style: Exercise
Skill Level: Beginner/Advanced
Focus Technique: Chromatic walking exercise, Chromatic 4 finger exercise
Excellent warm up and cool down exercise. For every level of player.
Perfect for strengthening each finger evenly. This Chromatic 4 finger exercise can be performed at any speed. It can be varied with other techniques. Try using hammer-ons, pull-offs.
Though it is simple, the benefits should never be underestimated. It is an extremely versatile and flexible guitar exercise.
The fingering action of 1, 4, 3, 2, is not important with this technique. The point is to build dexterity and finger strength whilst playing the guitar. The point of these kinds of exercise is to practise enough that no matter which finger combination you need, they are at the ready. Therefore regardless of what the music score is saying to play you are ready. So no matter where the other musicians go when improvising, you’re able to follow without missing a beat.
So if you’re playing a riff and you find yourself in a difficult part of the guitar neck, having the strength and dexterity to play out of that position into a more comfortable one is quick and easy. Use this Chromatic 4 finger exercise to work through each weakness.
Lots of guitarists and bass players find they only are comfortable in certain boxes or position. They find there are difficult finger combinations to play, eg. 3rd finger to 4th finger. This is exactly what these exercises sort out for you. Even though they look easy to play they have a huge amount of benefit. But we still advocate warming up and cooling down every time you pick up the guitar with these styles and combinations of exercises.
You will be very surprised by the progress you can make by simply warming up and cooling down with these exercises. This is because the Chromatic 4 finger exercise is perfect when you need to build strength in fingers that just won’t work the way you want them too. So just like normal scales build speed, this exercise builds even strength.