Learning the guitar is easier to accomplish when it is accompanied by warm-ups or exercises. These 5 guitar exercises will help you learn the guitar faster and are easy enough for any beginner to play.
The exercises below will help you to isolate different aspects of the guitar. Isolating right and left hand technique can help a beginning guitar player understand a concept easier. This helps when they are asked to play it in a song.
For example, I always introduce my students to fingerstyle warm ups before asking them to use specific right hand fingering in a song. I will also use the guitar pick exercise if I notice that a student prefers using their fingers in a song that would work better with a guitar pick.
The 5 guitar exercises below are listed in the general order that I teach them to a beginning guitar student.
1. Helicopter Warm-Up
Just because this says helicopter, it doesn’t mean that it’s just for kids! Learning how to put all of your fingers down and then lift them up to hover over the strings is a technique that will serve you all of your guitar playing years.
2. Guitar Pick Exercise
I introduce this exercise a week or two after I teach my students how to hold a guitar pick. This exercise usually seems to be welcomed as nothing is required of them on the left hand and they usually see great progress in their pick playing. Try playing a new exercise from this page every time you pick up the guitar this week. Your pick playing should hopefully improve.
3. Fingerstyle Exercise
This exercise will help you to get comfortable with your right hand fingers. This helps a lot when you get to a song like A Soalin’ or Blackbird where you need to play specific fingers (like p, i & m) on command.
4. Slur Exercise
Hammer Ons and Pull Offs are found everywhere in guitar (Think of Over The Hill and Far Away by Led Zeppelin). They can also add great flavor to any solo passage. My students play these better when they are isolated first in an exercise. I give this exercise to them any time I introduce them to slurs (hammer ons and pull offs) for the first time.
5. 16 Finger Combination Exercise
How many ways can you combine your 4 fingers into an exercise without repeating a finger? Sixteen. I have been playing this exercise since I was a kid and I’ve always loved it because you don’t have to remember a scale to get your fingers moving.
You will usually see this exercise written in box shaped form like this:
If have noticed that just giving a beginning player something with a bunch of numbers can be confusing. They often take it home and forget what they were supposed to do with it. That’s why I finally just took the time to write out in tab what is meant behind the numbers.
I use this exercise to teach about various finger positions. This is a two page exercise and the second page is available in PDF format for my subscribers (subscribe above).
I hope these exercises help! If you are new to the guitar, be sure to check out some of my lessons like easy songs for guitar using chords G, C & D7.
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