Download the resources here: Chord Chart & Scale Chart
Just like any other physical activity you engage in, stretching and warming up are important parts of staying healthy, avoiding injury, and maintaining good technique. Every time you sit down to practice the guitar, you shouldn’t jump right into the most challenging material you’re working on.
Instead, you’re better of going through a few technique-building warm-ups first. In this article, we’ll be going through a 10-minute practice routine as well as some additional warm-up exercises. Let’s get started with the first video.
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Before we get rolling, you’ll want to make sure you have your open chords down as well as a basic minor pentatonic scale. Download the charts above so you can see what you’ll be working with.
When you’re ready, start the video. For this practice along, you’ll be following along with Ayla.
We’ll begin by playing a 12-bar blues progression with an A major, D major, and E major chord. After you’ve been through the progression a few times you’ll switch to an A7 chord, D7 chord, and E7 chord. We’ll be using a few different strumming patterns throughout the play-along so be ready to change it up on the fly!
Once you’ve made it through the chords, we’ll move straight into using the A minor pentatonic scale. We’ll then shift down three frets to F# minor. After that, we go back to the A minor pentatonic but this time we’ll include the “blues” note.
For the last part of the practice along, we’ll be playing a chromatic scale to build on our dexterity. This one makes use of all four of your fingers on each string as you move up and down the scale. As you progress through the exercises, we’ll also try doubling the speed and even moving onto triplets!
If at any point you can’t keep up anymore or your fingers get too sore, feel free to stop. Your goal should be to work up to a point where you can play the entire thing through!
Next up, we’ll take a look at a few more dexterity exercises you can incorporate into your daily practice time.
Warming up is just as essential to having a productive practice session and avoiding injury as stretching. In this lesson, we’ll show you some warm-up exercises that you can do. A few of them are more focused on lead guitar, and a few are focused on rhythm guitar. Pick a couple that are appropriate for your skill level.
The first one is to simply play through a scale. Don’t play it quickly. Just play it fast enough that you can cleanly go through it. Go up and down the scale multiple times.
The next exercise is the chromatic scale. This scale involves the use of every finger and can be down by alternate picking the scale or by using hammer-ons and pull-offs. A good warm-up exercise for rhythm guitar is just cycling between open chords. Go through each chord shape you know, trying to put the shape down all at once.
Another good rhythm exercise is to make bar chord shapes all over the fretboard. Moving bar chord shapes around will really get the blood flowing in your hand.
Try using some of these warm-up exercises to start off your daily practice time and see if they make a positive impact.
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Jeff Turner
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