Get Big Results From Guitar Practice With Insane Finger Speed Warmup Exercises
It’s much easier to get better at guitar faster when you properly warm up your fingers. One of the fastest ways to warm up your fretting hand is to practice very intensely using legato guitar technique for a short period of time.
This increases your finger speed for guitar playing to a level that makes playing fast feel effortless. This is because it speeds up the rate at which your mind is able to process notes, making it easier for your fingers to perform the way you want them to.
Learn the legato exercises below and go over them for just 5-10 minutes before a guitar practice session:
Guitar Finger Speed Warmup Exercise #1: Speed Up Your Mental Processing With Fast Legato Bursts
It’s easier to play guitar at fast speeds when you don’t overwhelm yourself with tons of notes at once. Combining legato guitar technique with practicing in short speed bursts does the following:
- Warms up your fretting hand super-fast
- Warms up your mind super-fast (so you can process notes faster and get more from practice)
- Improves your legato technique and ability to play scales cleanly
Here’ what to do:
Choose any guitar scale you know to use as a warmup.
Play the first few notes of the scale as fast as you can, followed by a rest. Repeat this three times, like so:
Do this 3 times using the ascending pattern only. This focuses only on using hammer-ons.
Repeat the exercise three times while using a descending pattern only:
Next, play both ascending a descending for three repetitions:
Critical: Do not pick any notes. Not even the first note on each string.
Picking the first note of the string is like a crutch that keeps you from taking your legato guitar technique to a higher level.
The approach that gives you top level legato involves the following:
Step One: Hammer-on the first note of the string to get it to sound. Think of this like “tapping” with your fretting hand.
Step Two: Play the rest of the notes on the string.
Step Three: Just before hammering-on to play the first note of the next string, mute the previous string by lightly dampening it with your picking hand index finger. While doing this, be careful not to create harmonics.
Then, while playing descending patterns, use the side of your fretting hand index finger to mute the strings.
THIS is how killer legato guitar technique is perfected. This also helps you warm up your fretting hand fingers faster because it requires more movement.
Guitar Finger Speed Warmup Exercise #2: Warmup Fast And Train For Killer Legato Technique Using Rapid Hammer-Ons/Pull-Offs & Trills
You warm your hands up at hyper speed when you use very fast hammer-ons and pull-offs to play trills and other legato ornaments. This quickly gets the blood flowing to your fingers and helps you develop excellent legato technique in just a short period of time (due to playing tons of repetitions at once).
Using the tab below, perform the following movements in random order continuously for several 15 second intervals (followed by 15 seconds of rest each):
Hammer-on and pull-off rapidly using your index and middle fingers.
…using your middle and ring fingers.
…using your ring and pinky fingers.
…using your index and ring fingers.
Next, keep the blood flowing to your fingers while improving two other areas of your guitar technique. Practice your vibrato and bending technique with the same 15 second intervals using the exercise from this video:
Guitar Finger Speed Warmup Exercise #3: Make Your Legato More Creative Using Tapped Scales
Playing scales is a common staple in the guitar practice schedule of most guitarists. Using your picking hand index finger to tap the last note of the scale makes your scales sound smoother and more creative. It also helps you warm up your fretting hand fingers super-fast.
Use the fretting hand tapping technique from earlier to begin the scale.
Play the next note with a hammer-on, then tap the last note of the string.
Transferring cleanly to the next string requires particular focus to mute and stop unwanted guitar string noise.
Focus on muting the string below (in pitch) the one you are tapping using the lower area of your picking hand palm. Practice slowly to find the exact spot to mute with without accidentally muting the string you are playing.
Once you master the muting aspect of this at slower speeds, it quickly becomes easy to blaze through any scale using tapping.
Guitar Finger Speed Warmup Exercise #4: Speed Up Your Fingers At Warp Speed With Tapped Arpeggios
Turn on your amp to a clean or slightly overdriven setting. Then (using the muting techniques described in this article), play through these exotic-sounding arpeggios using only hammer-ons:
See how fast you are able to play them while trying to keep each note individual from the others.
Now you have several killer exercises to speed up your fingers for guitar practice that gives you better results than you would get without a warm up. It’s time to get even better results by practicing half of the time you practice now!
Learn how to double your guitar speed while practicing less with this free guitar shred resource.