Warm Ups – The Ascending Snake

Just as runners need to warm up before a race to loosen their muscles, guitarists need to warm up before a performance to stretch their fingers. The following warm up exercise is used by many electric guitar players and can be accompanied nicely by one of my cascading modal scale exercises. The focus here is on utilising all four [...]

Modal Scales – Cascading Lydian Modal Scale

Monday’s scale exercise demonstrated how scales can be broken up into small cascading clusters to create a very useful to warm up routine. Today we expand on this idea and play the Lydian Modal Scale in cascading clusters of four notes. Remember, this technical exercise works with any scale, in any key, on any sort of guitar, [...]

Modal Scales – Cascading Mixolydian Modal Scale

I warmed up with this cascading scale practice this morning, it is a great exercise to reinforce your scale knowledge because it requires you to produce different parts of the scale in small clusters of four notes. The scale I chose earlier today was the A Mixolydian Modal Scale (the fifth mode in the key of [...]

Technical Exercises – Finger Stretching and Motor Memory (part three)

Last month I posted a cool warm exercise that will help your finger muscles to recall certain shapes more easily. Today I am going to expand this with an exercise focussed on legato technique: Technical Exercises – Finger Stretching and Motor Memory (part three). Exercise one is focussed around what I call the 1, 2, 4 finger [...]

Dan’s Cool Warm Up Exercise and Youtube Video

Why not have a go at this fun and enjoyable technical exercise I created at the beginning of the week. It is quite a finger stretcher so make sure you take it take slowly to start with and be careful not to strain your fingers. When I play this exercise I’m thinking 1, 2, 4 [...]

Your Daily Free Electric Guitar Lesson

On Monday’s guitar lesson I shared a couple of finger stretching exercise that I developed on my electric guitar during practice. Today I am going to share part two which will help you to develop another shape that can be later applied to more melodic ideas and phrases. The purpose of these sorts of exercises [...]

Beginner’s Classical Guitar Lesson

Here’s a nice and easy warm-up for a complete beginner to have a go at. A simple little warm-up exercise using only open strings. The goal is play the exercise at a steady pace counting – 1, 2, 3, 4 | 1 &, 2& , 3&, 4 & – and tapping your foot nicely in [...]

Second Guitar Lesson On-line

Okay, so the second guitar lesson is for advanced electric guitar players. Ready-up your picking hands for some intense warm up exercises and practice improving you alternative picking before playing some technical heavy metal. By providing a guitar lesson on every weekday; Jamtastic is slowly on its way to becoming the best guitar blog – ever!