Warmup Exercises And Stretches

Whether it be for a practice session, recording, or a live performance, taking some time to properly warm up and stretch your fingers before playing is essential to be able to perform at the top of your abilities. I spend between 10 and 15 minutes before I start playing to warm up using these exercises and stretches. Hopefully you can learn a bit from these and implement them into your routines!

Exercise 1: Left Hand - Finger Strength/Independence

This exercise helps develop strength in your left hand's fingers. Mainly middle and ring finger since they're the weakest and usually aren't used for legato licks.

Index finger on fret 5 low E string, hammer on fret 6 middle finger, then make your way up the strings. When you get to the high E string, you pick fret 6, the pull off to fret 5 and make your way back down the strings. Repeat the same principle but instead of fret 6 with your middle finger, you play fret 7 with your ring. And then again on fret 8 with your pinky. Then fret 6 with your middle and fret 7 with your ring, then fret 6 with your middle and fret 8 with your pinky, then fret 7 with your ring and fret 8 with your pinky.

Exercise 2: Left Hand - Finger Strength/Flexibility

It's important to play this exercise with no distortion so that each note can be heard clearly. This exercise is really helpful for polishing your technique up so that when you play chords, each note can ring clearly and individually. It also helps you stretch your fingers so that you can play very wide stretches. I got this one from John Petrucci's Rock Discipline instructional video!

The basic idea of this exercise is a sort of diminished figure with 3 diminished 5th intervals stacked on top of each other. Index finger on fret 7 low E string, middle finger on fret 8 string 5, ring finger on fret 9 string 4, pinky on fret 10 string 3. The middle and ring fingers swap places with each other. And then the index and pinky.

Exercise 3: Left Hand/Right Hand Synchronization

Another one from Petrucci! This one is just a chromatic run up and down the fretboard to get the left and right hand synchronized with one another. I like to practice this exercise with a metronome and work up in intervals of 5 bpm until I get to around 150. Again, It's also important to play it with a clean tone so you can accurately hear any errors and work on fixing them.

I start with groupings of 4 notes per string, then triplets, then groups of 2.

Exercise 4: Left Hand - Finger Stretches

This one is great for stretching the fingers and getting that clarity when playing wide stretches. This isn't a strength warm up for legato and such so the notes can be either picked or hammered on. Whatever you want.

Similar to exercise 1 however, you play fret 5 with your index, 6 and 7 with your middle, 8 and 9 with your ring, and 10 and 11 with your pinky. Move up the strings.

If you fingers can't stretch wide enough, move the whole thing up a few frets to where your comfortable but try to push yourself to reach wider and wider stretches.

Exercise 5: Right Hand - Accuracy

This little pedal point exercise is an excerpt from Steve Vai's Tender Surrender. skipping 4 strings sounds quite simple in theory but it's pretty tricky to play it clean and up to speed so this little bit helps work on the accuracy of the right hand.

Start off picking fret 21 on the high E string, then 22 (This is your pedal note), then 17, 22 on the high E, 17 on the B string, 22 on the high E, 17 on the G string, 22 on the high E, 17 on the D string, 21 on the B string, 17 on the A string.