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Effective Speed Building Guitar Licks Exercises

Practicing speed building exercises on your guitar will improve your technique tremendously. The speed exercises will not just make you play faster, but also your dexterity will advance. Dexterity will create flow, easiness and flexibility on all fronts of your guitar playing.

When you practice the exercises for a while you will find that your fingers will feel lighter and move more fluently across the strings and fretboard as you solo or switch between chords. Guitar playing becomes more effortless.

The exercises in this post all have their own challenges that will develop and improve different parts of your technique. Exercise #1 and #5 are your typical 3 notes-per-string super fast lick that sound really awesome once you get them up to speed, but they’re just as nice to practice slowly or at mid tempo, exercise #4 is a nice blues lick, and others will serve different purposes to enhance your skills. Just try each one of them and explore.

Take it easy, take your time, and as always, enjoy the process!

SPEED BUILDING EXERCISE #1 ( A minor )

Below is a nice fast A minor lick scale run that you can play over an A minor chord or harmony / progression (Am – Bdim – C – D – Em – F – G – Am). Start slow, play every single note clean and clear and only increase your speed when you feel comfortable playing at a slow tempo.

Improve Your Guitar Knowledge and Skills Faster

By Klaus Crow 6 Comments

Improve Guitar Knowledge and Skills Faster

We all have tons of excuses to justify the times we don’t practice. We need to work, maintain our relationships, play with our kids, finish up tasks, exercise, eat and sleep. How in the world is there any time left?

How can you improve your skills amidst all of this, stay motivated and keep learning and growing when there are times when you can’t pick up the guitar?

Well, there are many places and times throughout the day where you can do some really valuable exercises to make huge changes in your guitar playing. I’ll first show you WHAT you can do, and then HOW and WHEN can you get better at playing guitar everyday, anywhere and anytime! Let’s check it out.

Memorizing the Notes on the Guitar

You can start by learning the notes on the guitar. Memorize where every note (all 12) are located on the guitar neck on every string. Start by memorizing all the “F” notes on all strings. Say out loud: The F note is located on the Low E-string, 1st fret | F on the A-string, 8th fret | F on the D-string, 3rd fret | F on the G-string, 10th fret | F on the B-string, 6th fret | F on the high e-string, 1st fret.

Try to visualize where the note is located on the neck while you’re naming the fret and string. Then pick another random note and repeat the exercise. Keep doing that until you know all 12 notes from the top of your head.

Memorizing Scales

Next, learn to name all the scale notes of each key out loud. Start with the C major scale: C – D – E – F – G – A – B – C, then the G major scale: G – A – B – C – D – E – F# – G, next the F major scale: F – G – A – Bb – C – D – E – F and so on. Just pick any key in random order, until you’ve gone through all 12 keys.

You can also do this with the natural minor scale, and every other scale. Just like the first exercise try to visualize where the notes of each scale are located on the strings.

Memorizing Chords and Progressions

You can also memorize all the chords you can derive from each major scale in every key. C major scale chords = C – Dm – Em – F – G – Am – Bdim , F major scale chords are: F – Gm – Am – Bb – C – Dm – Edim, G major scale chords: G – Am – Bm – C – D – Em – F#dim, and so on.

3rds Intervals over 5 Major Scale Shapes/Positions

By Klaus Crow 3 Comments

I hope you are doing okay with everything that is going on now. These are crazy times, but we have to make the best of it. We have to help each other out while keeping a safe distance, be considerate of others, smile to people to relieve a bit of their burden, but with all that don’t forget yourself along the way. Being kind to yourself too. Have a bit of fun. Try to enjoy the present moment.

For those of you who stay at home, you might have some more time on your hands now to enjoy the guitar, develop a nice practice routine, and make some good progress. Well, here’s a great guitar workout for you…

Practicing melodic intervals really developed my skills to solo and improvise over major chord progressions. Just by going through the scale intervals on a regular basis you are training the muscle memory for your fingers and acquiring the vocabulary for your creative mind to help you shape your musical brain and come up with melodic ideas. It’s an exercise that is not to be underestimated.

In this lesson we are going to learn “melodic intervals in 3rds” following the major scale. We’ll practice these 3rd intervals over 5 different scale shapes/positions across the neck, so we’ve got a great workout for you! Don’t worry we’ll take it step by step.

Make sure you know the major scale in 5 shapes/positions before you start this lesson, but on the other hand you can also skip that for now if you just became excited to dive into this lesson. You can always come back to that later. I can imagine you want to try at least the first exercise to know what we’re talking about here. I totally understand.

Another upside is that the exercises will train your ear to recognize 3rd intervals. This will improve your aural skills, which is a important part of becoming an accomplished musician (Try to sing along the notes as you play the exercises). The practice of playing the intervals will also increase your dexterity. A win-win situation in many ways.

How to Learn a Scale Inside Out to Improvise a Guitar Solo

By Klaus Crow Leave a Comment

As a guitar student you want to learn your scales inside out, not just to expand your music theory or to develop dexterity, but to learn to solo and improvise.

In order to solo and improvise you need to know the words of the language. You need to know how to use those words in a fluent manner with confidence and ease to express your musical emotions.

This is where the scale comes in. The scale contains the letters and the words to tell your story.

In this lesson I will give you the exercises to really dig into the scale and memorize it from top to bottom, backwards and forwards so you can start your journey to learn to solo and improvise.

We will use the G major scale as an example, but you can apply this to any scale.

There’s a lot of exercises and examples here so take your time with it. Start with one exercise and practice it until you can play it at a comfortable level, then move on to the next. Before you know it your fingers are running the show.

Let’s dive in!

Play in Position. First learn the scale playing it in position using the appropriate fingering. “Playing in position” means your left hand remains in a fixed location, with each finger assigned to a specific fret. See below in example 1. Now play the scale following example 2 and use the finger positioning of example 1.

Numbers on the dots: 1 = first finger assigned to the second fret, 2 = second finger assigned to the third fret, 3 = third finger assigned to the fourth fret, 4 = fourth finger assigned to the fifth fret. The red dots indicate the root note of the scale (in this case the G note).

Example 1:

Example 2:

Play with one finger. In this exercise you play the scale with only one finger (see example 3), so you become really conscious of where each note in the scale is located. Don’t underestimate this exercise. It is really important. Play it like example 2, but with the fingering of example 3.

Example 3:

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