I’ve made good progress in recent months in terms of improving my finger control and stopping the fingers flying too far off the fretboard - ie when doing a scale - and thus improved my speed a fair bit.
However my middle finger continues to misbehave - especially if my ring finger or pinky are down.
Does anyone know of a good exercise for trying to address this? I’m working on doing chromatic exercises (ie just 1234 etc) using the tiniest movements possible but I’m still having a fair bit of trouble with that specific finger.
Interested to hear any tips!
Comments
That said, I'd love to see some exercises too.
The main principle is only move one finger at a time. So you'd go 1234 on the E, but as you put a finger down you leave the previous fingers down, and you do this when you cross strings.
So you'd go 1234 putting a finger down each time, but then on the next string with the 1 you only move your first finger, leaving your other fingers on 234 on the previous string. Next note would be 2 on the next string, and you'd already have your first finger on the 1 of that string but the the 34 frets on the previous string would still be fretted. If that makes sense. Then the 3 on the next string, with your 12 fingers already on that string but the 4 on the previous string. Then bring the 4 across, and repeat on to the next string.
I'd do that 3 ways, using the names of the strings:
1. String to string, so E A D G B E, and back down E B G D A E.
2. Up 3, down 1, so E A D, A D G, D G B, G B E, and back down E B G, B G D, G D A, D A E.
3. String skipped, so E D, A G, D B, G E, and back down E G, B D, G A, D E
I hope that makes sense and that I've not made a mistake somewhere.
so on some runs/chords it will be fine, but on others it will fly off
so thats what you have to work on.
it’s doable, partly it’s rebuildimg neural networks with exercises
”finger independence” in google shows. Number of ideas, e.g
http://hubguitar.com/technique/build-finger-independence
Also, when playing legato (especially with a clean sound and on acoustic) sometimes my fingers come further away from the fretboard so I can slam them down harder, compared to a close-in light touch when using a higher gain sound.
At one time I looked at keeping my fingers close to the fretboard. It helped me to keep my hand in a good position, so that the smaller fingers don’t have too far to travel. After a while I backed off because I found that it interfered with my playing. If you play like a sowing machine, and pick every note with the same attack, then keeping your finger tips close helps with speed. If your playing includes hammers, pull-offs and legato then you need the extra distance for those notes which need more emphasis.
Most people use 1234 exercises, with equal emphasis on each note, to improve finger independence. They help, but they are not particularly musical, and it’s not often that you can incorporate them into your playing. Scales are a little better because they have more use in real playing. Even better is to play melodies, and focus on emphasising key notes in the melody. Sometimes you’ll find it useful to move position and/or change string in order to use a different finger and string to get the right sound for a particular note. D and G strings are the obvious area for this. My experience has been that, if you focus on melody and emphasis, the fingers will fall into line.
The chromatic scale and 1234 stuff will help too if done regularly.
So I went back to the old, horribly inefficient way of doing things and just accepted the fact that I wasn't going to be playing particularly fast. I can live with that.