Pribek

One of the first obstacles one faces when learning to play guitar is; there is a physical aspect that is unique to the guitar. You can have the information right in front of your eyes, a chord diagram or a tab, and you can know where the fingers are supposed to go but, unless you have developed the physical technique, the fingers won’t cooperate.

You need to develop, finger strength, finger independence, picking technique and coordination between the two hands. All at the same time.

I am going to present a series of exercises that will help accomplish all of those things and, at the same time.

These are non-musical exercises.

These aren’t scales or musical sounding patterns of notes, these are meant for working on the physical aspect which, in turn, will allow you to tackle the musical aspect with freedom.

For beginners: If you have never played or are just starting, these exercises can be extremely helpful. If you were to work on these for a couple of weeks first, then went to work on those chord diagrams or tabs, you would find that your fingers would be more cooperative and you would learn the things you want to learn faster.

If you have been playing for a while: These exercises stress finger independence, not just finger strength. Doing these exercises properly will clean up technique, even chord technique because, they focus on making your fingers equal partners. They focus on strengthening the weak link.

They can also be used as a great warm up routine for accomplished players.

First one…

The thumb of your fret hand needs to be on the back of the neck, in between the first and second fret. The top of the thumb should be angled slightly towards the headstock. The thumb acts as a pivot, that is the key to finger stretches. As you play notes on the third and fourth fret, pivot (turn) the thumb to accommodate the stretch. A lot of players use different hand positions for different things. For instance, you will see players grabbing the top of the neck for leverage when doing wide string bends. Not with this though, a classical style hand position is needed for this exercise.
Play each note with the tip of the finger. Place each finger as close to the fret as possible. You don’t have to press hard-the closer your finger is to the fret, the less pressure required. Pressing too hard makes the note go sharp.

When ascending, keep the first finger in place behind the first fret as you play the next note. Do this with each finger, each note. When you have played all four notes on a string, all four fingers should still be on the string before you go to the next string.

Some players naturally play ascending patterns better, some descending. If you play the going up part better than the going down part-slow the going up part to match your speed on the going down part. Find which one you are weakest at. Play the whole thing ascending and descending, without stopping when you change from ascending to descending, as slowly as you need to in order to execute it flawlessly.

Alternate pick each note. Start with a down stroke. Repeat the pattern and start with an up stroke.

When you can do all of this mistake free, doesn’t matter how fast, repeat the whole thing starting on the second fret. Eventually, work until you can play the pattern starting on each of the first five frets and then returning the whole pattern, one position at a time back to the first fret. Then, when you have built strength, go to the twelfth fret and back.

If you feel any pain, at any time, stop immediately.

Play slow-speed will come-accuracy and independence are more important, they will allow you to develop clean speed.

The next set of exercises really focus on finger independence.

All of the same rules apply, fingertips, close to the frets, leave the previous note fretted on the going up part, alternate pick, slow as needed, ascending and descending without stopping then…

Now, you will most likely find that using fingers 2 and 3 more difficult but, probably not as tricky as…

Whichever one is the most difficult, that needs to be your tempo. The weakest link needs to catch up to the things that you do with ease. And, believe it or not, restraining yourself on the easier parts helps develop tempo.

Next…

and…

and finally…

By this point you have worked every possible two note/two finger-per string combination. The weakest links have received as much attention as the ones that come with ease. If you do this enough, the gap between them starts to close.

Now, here’s the routine.

Spend 15-20 minutes a day on this. Don’t overdo it. Any pain, stop immediately.
Play the four finger exercise for half of the 15-20 minutes.
Spend the other half of the time on the two finger exercises as a set.
As you build strength, start moving them up and down the neck-all of them

Over the years, I have shown this routine to hundreds of guitar players at different levels of ability. The ones that tried it showed improvement in all aspects of their playing in a matter of a few weeks. It can be very frustrating, even though it looks simple on paper. The trick is to have patience, play slow and clean-speed will come-dexterity will come.

I’ve always been intrigued by the way different musicians will use dissonance as a way to increase tension.

Tension and release-those are the building blocks.

You create tension then, resolve the tension. Tension and release-it’s the key to storytelling. If you build the tension properly, the audience wants to know; needs to know what’s going to happen next. They will be on the edge of their seats. Then, when they get to just the right point…resolve the situation. There is a sense of closure-satisfaction; that is the release.

The tension is the hard part to master. Like spice in a stew, too much and nobody can stomach it, too little and it tastes flat. Have you ever seen a comedian tell a joke and nobody laughed, even though the punch line was right? He didn’t do a good job creating tension.

Some players call the use of dissonance to create tension, “outside playing”.

Inside-Outside

An old musician once told me; “You got to be in to go out and you got to be out to go in.”

What that means is, if you want to explore some outside playing, you have to know what’s inside first.

A good place to play outside stuff would be over any kind of a Dominant7 chord (any chord that contains, root, major 3rd, 5th, flat 7). This could be a V chord leading to a I like, G7 to C in the key of C, or over any chord in a typical blues progression.

If someone played an A7 chord…a good way to get at this would be to record yourself playing an A7 chord over and over for say, 32 bars or more. Because, hearing the notes played against the chord is the best way to develop this stuff.

Anyway, here are some inside-ish kinds of things that work over the A7 chord.

A Major Pentatonic

Here’s something you need to know, any dominant chord already has some dissonance built in. The A7 chord is spelled; A-C#-E-G. The A and the G played against each other are dissonant. If you play an A7 and then a D Major chord you will hear tension and release in action. The A7 is the tension and it naturally resolves to D. That’s because the A7 is the natural dominant chord built on the 5th note of a D Major scale.

But, that isn’t the only way an A7 chord is used. For this exercise, I want you to think of the A7 as it would be used in a blues song. If you played a blues song in A, you might play an A7 every time around until the last note where you might play a regular A Major chord without the 7; different type of resolution. So, if you have recorded or, have somebody that will repeatedly play an A7 while you noodle around, just think of it as an A7 vamp. See, you can go outside and back inside within the context of the A7. It’s just a place to start.
Anyway, any of these scale ideas contain dissonance as well. In the A Pentatonic you have the B note and the F# note. When you play either of those notes over the A7 chord, you are extending the chord. The B note played on top of the A7 chord turns it into a A9 chord. The 9 is an extension. If you add the F# note on the top string, the chord becomes a 13; A13. The point is that, even with the simple 5 note scale you are creating more complex sounds.

A Mixolydian

Mixolydian is big old word. There are different ways to think about this one. If you are prone to Pentatonic thinking, it’s the 5 note scale with two extra notes added. There is the D, which played against an A7 chord extends it and it becomes A11. There is the G, which is the 7 in A7.

A Blues

Now we are getting into a different part of the swimming pool. Some people think of this scale as a minor type of scale. You will even see it referred to as an A Minor Blues scale. And, that’s fine. When you are playing this scale over the A7 chord you are now bringing two new notes to the party. You have the C and the E flat notes. Sometimes called “blue notes”, these notes are not extending the A7 chord, they are altering the chord. These notes aren’t adding to the chord, they are changing the nature of it. A lot of times, the C and the E flat are used as “passing tones”, meaning that you pass through them on the way to ending a phrase somewhere else. When you play the C over the A7 chord it “alters” it and changes it to an A7 augmented 9. Some people call this the “Hendrix chord”. The E flat, played against the A7 chord, turns it into an A7 flat 5. These notes cause genuine tension. Try phrases that incorporate these notes and end on the root note, A. you will hear a good example of tension and release in a blues context.

This next one is a hybrid affair.

There are guys who have made a living with this thing right here. It contains elements of all of the previous examples and it contains tension and release all within reach without shifting. Any blues/rock type player you’ve heard has used some variation on this.

All of these ideas can be employed up and down the fretboard. The ideas are the same but the fingerings, the shapes, change. If you can get the ideas, the shapes will come. The ideas are universal, the shapes are guitar specific.

Inside-Outside Evolution

I reached a point in my playing where I was familiar with all of the above concepts. I was hearing different things in my head. I was trying to figure how to work different tension in to my lines. I would hear different players, not just guitar players, that could move effortlessly between dissonance and resolution; between tension and release and, they had different sounding phrases than the ones I was coming up with. I figured that they were able to understand concepts that were going to be forever out of my grasp.

Little by little, through trial and error and simply asking people, some ideas started to take shape. To my surprise, a lot of the ideas they were using to invent these fluid and intense lines, weren’t as complicated as I suspected. I learned that a lot of guys went “outside” with ease because they were using simple but outside ideas.

Different players have different ways of seeing and thinking about it, sometimes two different players can be talking about the same thing with different language.

One concept kept popping up; using minor or, minor 7th ideas over a Dominant7 chord. One that, I was doing without realizing, was using a minor idea starting on the 5 of the Dominant chord. For instance, play E minor (E being the 5 of the A7) over an A7 chord. Here is a fingering that lays in the same region as the above examples.

Here are the notes of the E minor scale and how they relate to the A7 chord in parentheses:
E(5), F#(6/13), G(7), A(Root), B(9), C(Aug.9), D(4/11)
So, you have some inside notes and some outside ones (both extended and altered) in one neat little package. And, even though some of the notes appear in some of the above examples, the phrasing comes out differently because you are working with the notes in a different group context. The way to practice is, to play over your A7 chord using one of the above ideas then, play 4 or 8 notes from the E Minor choices then, go back to the first idea.

“You got to be in to go out and you got to be out to go in.”

The idea is, you don’t want to live outside, go outside for a bit, come back in.
Not every idea is going to work but, if you keep at it, you will find some pretty unique things that do. You will become familiar and find your own things the same way you did with the blues scale.

But Wait! That’s Not All!

These minor tonality ideas are very powerful. The beauty of thinking minor to go outside is this, there is a whole different universe that can be accessed by thinking up another minor third. You were using E minor, up a minor third from there is G minor.

Here are the notes of the G minor scale and how they relate to the A7 chord in parentheses:
G(7), A(Root), Bflat(flat9), C(Aug.9), D(4/11), Eflat(flat5), F(#5)
A little more altered sounding. Again do the same thing, play 4 or 8 notes out of the G minor choices then, go back inside. Once you start getting the hang of it, incorporate both the E minor and G minor before heading back. Take 4 notes from each and return to the familiar ground. These are just two things to get you started playing outside and, actually these minor ideas keep extending. You can go up another minor 3rd and play B flat minor ideas over the same A7 chord. Then, you can go up one more minor 3rd and play C# minor over A7. If you go again you are back to E minor.

Like I said, there are many different ways to go about it. There are only 12 notes so, a lot of the different things people do overlap with other concepts. The minor ideas seem to lay well under the fingers for outside playing, to me. It all comes down to familiarizing yourself with the fretboard and sounds but, once it starts to flow you will be surprised at how natural it sounds. And, you will be surprised at the spots where this stuff starts to fit.

It does a body good to get outside once in a while.