Pinky Power!

Hey there my friend… Pull up a chair, let’s talk guitar chops 🙂

There’s SOOO many ways we can work on our chops.
One obvious area of chops is our picking… Another obvious area is
our left hand fretting. I want to focus on that today, and specifically
on the pinky because its often the weakest finger when it comes
to fretting.

If we can improve the weak link that’s the pinky, we
can gain a lot more control, chops, and power.

So today, I’m going to focus on an 8-note repeating lick.
Work on this one, and practice it as fast and as clean as you can.

Here’s the lick:

I’m going to demonstrate this at 160 bpm. First I’ll play it slow
a couple times with pauses, then I’ll play it slow repeating, and then fast repeating.

See if you can play it faster and cleaner than I’m playing it here! Of course,
if you can’t that’s fine, just play it clean at whatever speed you
can, and go from there.

Now, whenever I’m learning a new lick and I want to
play it as fast and as clean as possible, I often examine what
the right hand picking is doing first, and master that on its own.

We are using strict alternate picking starting with
a downstroke. If we don’t fret any of the notes and just
play open strings on the D and G strings, we get this:

JUST THE RIGHT HAND PICKING:

[audio:https://www.claudejohnson.com/blog/audio/april2011-ex1.mp3]

This isn’t too difficult… But now try adding the left hand. You’ll use the following
fingers for the eight note in the lick:

Index, Middle, Pinky, Middle, Pinky, Middle, Pinky, Middle.

So you’re using your pinky a lot and on 2 different strings. Have fun!

RIGHT AND LEFT HANDS TOGETHER:

[audio:https://www.claudejohnson.com/blog/audio/april2011-ex2.mp3]