A short, spoken YouTube guitar tutorial by Lauren Bateman teaching a finger-independence exercise. The lesson places the four left-hand fingers on consecutive frets starting at the 5th fret of the 3rd (G) string, then practices moving each finger individually to the high E (1st) string and low E (6th) string in a repeated "top, bottom" pattern. The instructor emphasizes relaxing the third finger (often the hardest to isolate), gives a practice prescription (counting repetitions up to 20 per finger once or twice daily), and suggests doing the motion off the guitar (flat on a desk) to build independence and improve chord changes.
Chapters
Hey, everybody. How's it going? It's Lauren here, and today we're going to talk about some more finger for independence exercises. Today we're going to work on getting some independence between each of your individual fingers. And how we're going to do that is we're going to go to our fifth fret on the third string right there. And then we're going to put each finger on the next subsequent fret. So the second finger will go on the sixth fret, seventh fret, and eighth fret, all on this third string. So now what we're going to do is we're going to move each finger individually all the way to the top on the sixth string, the big, fat E string, and then all the way to the bottom on the low E string. So you're just going to do that. You're going to go top, bottom, top, bottom, top, bottom. Just like that.
Not. Not too bad. The first finger shouldn't be too difficult for you. Put that back. Next thing I want to do is the second finger.
Again. Top, bottom, top, bottom, top, bottom. Just like that. Now we're going to move to the pinky. We're going to skip the third finger for now. I'm going to go top, bottom.
Just like that.
Good. Now we're going to try the third finger. And for most of you, the third finger is going to be the problem finger for a lot of you. You're going to get up to the top, and then you're going to try and bring it back down. You're going to be powering it to get back to that first string. So just get your finger to relax. That's the key to this exercise, is you just want your finger to relax so that you can go up and down, up and down. And, you know, it might take you a week to get this third finger and to get these fingers to really relax, because what's happening here is. I mean, you got your hand and all your tendons are connected. So even if you just. If you take your hand, I'll point mine towards you, and you close your pinky. Look what happens. Slowly my other fingers start to close. So we're trying to get some independence with your fingers because this is gonna. This is gonna help. When you're doing your chord changes, you got a lot of ups and downs and moving. Your fingers are doing a lot of this. Now, this is a good exercise because you can do this in the office. If you're at work, you don't need your guitar. You can just put your fingers flat on the desk and then move them same way, just like that. Now, to work this exercise, what I would do is I just used to count about 20 times. One, two, three, four, five. Until you get to 20. Move to the next finger. One, two, three, Four, five. Go to the next finger. One, 2, 3, 4, 5. Go to the next one, one. So all the way up to 20. And if you do that just once a day, or even twice a day for every day, you're going to see a huge improvement by the end of the first week. This third finger should loosen up a lot, and that's going to help you with chord changes. If you're having difficulty changing chords.
Kind of these types of chord progressions and chord changes going from your G to your C. If you're having trouble with that, this is going to help loosen that up, make your chord changes a little easier. And it's not really an exciting exercise, but it's one of those exercises that does help a lot if you do it consistently every day. And you'll probably only have to do it for a couple weeks just to get some independence built up in your fingers. But other than that, that's the exercise fairly simple. There's some more if you want some more challenging ones in part two, so finish up with part one, get that really nice, and then I'll see you back for part two.
