In this hub i'm going to show you how to transform those stiff fingers of yours into those capable of fretboard wizardry! I'm not going to ramble on too much as this article is going to mainly show you some exercises and other things that will enable you to use all of your fingers to their fullest while playing the Guitar.

When playing the guitar, you will notice that you generally tend to only want to use the first three fingers of your fretting hand and will avoid using your little finger at all costs. I guess the obviouse reason for this is that it's smaller and not very strong and is not naturally able to do many things independantly on the guitar. Although this is the case, you can train your little finger to become a lot stronger and a lot more independant.

These exercises are going to be purely for finger strength and independence. You should do these exercises regularly. Some of the exercises may be extremely easy at first, and some may be extremely difficult. This means that it makes sense to practice the weirder finger patterns/combinations more often than easier ones you can already do.

You first need to place your hand on the 6th string with your fingers on frets 1 - 4. Now go through the fingerings below (1 - index finger, 2 - middle finger, etc). Go through them one time on each string. When you feel the need to increase the challenge, play it in the opposite direction after you played it in the normal fashion.

01. 1-2-3-4
02. 1-2-4-3
03. 1-3-2-4
04. 1-3-4-2
05. 1-4-2-3
06. 1-4-3-2
07. 2-1-3-4
08. 2-1-4-3
09. 2-3-1-4
10. 2-3-4-1
11. 2-4-1-3
12. 2-4-3-1
13. 3-1-2-4
14. 3-1-4-2
15. 3-2-1-4
16. 3-2-4-1
17. 3-4-1-2
18. 3-4-2-1
19. 4-1-2-3
20. 4-1-3-2
21. 4-2-1-3
22. 4-2-3-1
23. 4-3-1-2
24. 4-3-2-1

When you have mastered a lot of those exercises mentioned in the previous section of this lesson, you can start to try and mix things up a bit by throwing a string change into the exercise. A good example of how you can do this to start off is shown in the image below.

Once you have tried out different variations of that exercise, you can then make it even more of a challenge by introducing some string skips into it. A good example of this is shown in the image below.

Thank you all for checking out my article. There will be more in the future! If you have any comments, please feel free to post them and i will read and reply to them. If you also have any lesson requests, be it beginner territory or advanced, feel free to also ask.

:)