It's time your pinky got a good workout! Check out this Guitar Lesson
As a continuation of the previous guitar lesson where we started looking at how we can use the chromatic scale to build speed through finger independence and hand synchronicity, here's the next exercise.
This one evolved from the third exercise in the previous post here: Guitar Speed Exercises - Finger Independence. as I found my pinky was my weakest finger and wanted to give it some extra training!
This one is great as it targets the weakest fingers - the pinky and third of the fretting hand.
The independence between these two is often a problem, with both fingers often moving when we just want to move one of them and the pinky just not wanting to do its own thing.
Take a look at the tab below and notice where we are moving back and forth between these two fingers, really starting to build their strength and independence - especially that pinky! I've marked the first time we do this with the yellow arrows.
Remember to alternate pick the entire time, as marked, so pick down then up etc.
Also try to keep the fingers of your fretting hand close to the strings at all time and spread out over the frets they will be playing. So if we look a the first bar, it will be your first finger for fret 5, second finger for fret 6, third for fret 7 and that pinky for fret 8. It is then your pinky that will move to fret 9 on the second string.
Have fun, use a click, and take it slow. Only add BPM to the click if all is perfect.
Try this every day for 2 weeks and see how your speed improves. It will!
This exercise will work on lots of areas of hand synchronisation, finger independence, picking accuracy and more.