Category: Guitar Lessons

Fourth finger Hammer-on and Pull-off exercise
by koree

I’m going to start occasionally posting the things I’m working on on guitar. Hopefully this might help you as well while you’re stuck at home and trying to improve your chops.

This exercise works your fourth finger, while doing both hammers and pulls, and alternates between incorporating the third and second fingers in the motion. It is a segment of the E major/D Flat minor scale. As written, it will sound more like E major.

Start this exercise at 40 bpm. Try to get up to at least 200bpm. But shoot for 320bpm. This would enable you to do this as sixteenth note triplets at 160bpm.

20200513-Fourth-Finger-Hammer-Pull-ExercisesDownload

Enjoy!

Weekly Guitar Lesson: Chromatic Scale Exercise
by koree

A Chromatic Scale is one that includes all half-steps between the starting and ending note.  Chromatic scales technically lack a key because they play every half-step.  This is the equivalent of starting on a particular piano key, and playing every white and black key as you go up or down.

Typically, the notes are written with sharps while ascending, and flats while descending, but my notation software was not smart enough for that, so please forgive me.

This exercise is designed to be practiced similarly to last week’s lesson.  Start somewhere around 40bpm to 60pm, and go up in intervals of 5bpm.  Notice that the descending fingering is different than the ascending.  I believe this is the best way to play a chromatic scale and continue fluidly.

Play around with the pattern some.  This particular one starts on B and ends on B, but you can move the pattern anywhere on the neck and still play it.  Move it around and come up with your own exercise.

Finally, if you find yourself having trouble with this one, practice the four-fret exercise from the daily workout.

You can download the Chromatic Scale exercise here.