Here are some of my typical warm-up exercises. I’ve found that doing my warm-ups on an acoustic really has helped strengthen my fingers and improve dexterity greatly – since acoustic strings are typically thicker gauge than electric strings. I’m also able to keep both my acoustic and electric chops in shape.
I use the 4 fingered chromatic exercises quite often – my warm-up most days begins with a run through of all 24 permutations of the 4 fingered chromatic exercises, alternate picking down the strings and then back up through one cycle and then start another permutation.
i.e. 1-2-3-4 (6th string -> 1st string -> back up to 6th string) and do all the mathematical possibilities (1-2-3-4, 1-2-4-3, 1-3-2-4, 1-3-4-2, 1-4-2-3, 1-4-3-2, 2-1-3-4 and so on). It’s helpful to do this around the first fret as well as higher up on the neck – since the fret widths are different and the height of the string off the fretboard varies with respect to the neck positioning.
I vary the exercises by palm muting, alternate picking, all downstrokes, all upstrokes, all legato (hammer-ons and pull-offs) and so on.
Here’s one I stole from a website called the “Spider”
http://www.justinguitar.com/html/technique_html/Spider.html
and another one from the same guy called “the finger gym”
http://www.justinguitar.com/html/technique_html/FingerGym.h tml
Last year I took lessons from a metal-shred guy and picked up some good exercises from him. I really started working on the “hammer-on from nowhere” technique. Here’s a Greg Howe lesson: http://www.brightcove.tv/title.jsp?title=1119240903&cha nnel=298839030
Another thing that helped out immensely was playing just with my left hand, not using my pick. I’ll put a scrunchie around the guitar neck so that it mutes out unwanted sound and I’ll run through different scale exercises. I’ll run through pentatonic sequences, scale sequences or whatever with just my left hand.
I’ll also do picking or legato exercises in which I use a pinkie note every other note.
i.e. 4p1h4p4, 4p2h4p2h4, 4p3h4p3 and so on.
Then I’ll run through unusual fingerings, scales, modes and work on songs like Paginini’s Caprice #5.
With the chromatic exercises – yeah it’s like lifting weights but you’re right you can apply whatever variables or dynamics to them, but I do this sorta stuff while I’m watching tv – I can work on mindless exercises for hours on end. You could do legato, staccato, muted, skip beats, play them in different rhythmic variations (i.e. do the 4 note sequence in triplets).
