Guitar Picking Exercises for Beginners

Hey, everybody. How's it going? It's Lauren here, and I'm in my music studio. And today we're going to go over some hand independence exercises that you can use to strengthen your fingers, stretch out your fingers, and just build overall dexterity in your fingers. So the first exercise we're going to go over is the 1, 2, 3, and 4s, and there's also a PDF file with all the different combinations on the website, so you can go and download that. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to go over a couple of the combinations and how this exercise is going to work for you. So you want to use this exercise with a metronome and do I have a metronome?

So, yeah, you want to use this with a metronome, whether you have a boss or a chord, whatever. And all you want to do is you want to set this to a rhythm or a beat that's slow enough for you to complete each exercise without being really frantic when you're playing. So you don't want to be. And hearing a lot of this going on, you really want to have each note ring out.

Good, just like that. So you don't want to be going.

Because that's not. That's not going to help you. It's not going to help you get faster, and you're not really going to build your finger dexterity correctly. So what we'll do here is I'm just going to set my metronome for a really slow beat here. This is about 50 beats per minute.

And the first exercise, if you look on the sheet, is labeled 1, 2, 3, 4. So all that you're going to do is you're going to put your first finger, first fret, and for some of you, the first fret, if you do this on the first, second, third, and fourth fret, that might be too much of a stretch for your hands. So you can actually slide your hand up. And you could start at, you know, 5, 6, 7, 8, or you could even go 9, 10, 11, 12, because the further up the neck you get, you can see my frets are really wide down here, really short down here. It's just going to be a little bit less stretch for your hand, but eventually you're going to want to be able to do it at the first fret. So I got my metronome going here. So we're going to take a look at this exercise just on the first fret for right now. So we're going to go 1, 2, 3, 4, move to the next string. 1, 2, 3, 4. Next string.

All the way up. So I just sped up at the end just to just to go a little faster so you didn't have to watch me do the whole thing. But that's basically what you want to do. You're going to start out 1, 2, 3, 4, and then let's pick another combination. Let's say.

1, 3, 4, 2 is another combination. You would start one, use your third finger, fourth finger, second finger, all the way down. 1, 3, 4, 2, 1, 3, 4, 2nd, 1, 3, 4, two, all the way down, and then all the way back up to the guitar. And as you'll see, there's a bunch of different combinations on that sheet. Just start with the ones and don't move on to the twos until you feel very comfortable doing each of the ones exercises. Now, when should you move on?

I'd say about 75 beats per minute at 4 beats. So basically, it would sound like this. So my metronome can actually do.

Four beats. So this would be four beats at 50, which was the speed I just did.

So 75 would be much faster if I can find 75.

So that's gonna be 75. One, two, three, four. One, two, three, Four, one.

That's pretty much the exercise for you there. Again, take your time. Go really slow. Don't rush it. We don't want to be going. You don't want a bunch of that happening. The other thing, don't rush. Don't try to bite it all off at once. Just take your time. Work with each combination. Set the metronome to a proper speed. Your hands will get faster. Make sure to write down too, how fast you're doing it from week to week, because every week you want to try and increase your speed by, you know, a couple more beats per minute. Five beats per minute. This way, every week, you're getting faster and faster, and you're building the hand dexterity in your hands. So that's it for today's lessons. I hope you guys enjoyed it, and I'll see you soon.