Spider Exercises
Hello again! Right, this is my favourite exercise to try and sort out people’s picking, timing hand positions and all sorts, let’s look at the tab first. I’ve tabbed it out as constant eighth notes but you could easily start at quarter notes or even sixteenths this is all about the exercise and keeping it in time. Here it is:
There’s a few things to focus on with this one, lets look at the right hand first, this is often people’s downfall especially if they started out on classical guitar, as the fundamental difference in hand positions can confuse people.
Your right hand should be pretty much attached to the bridge right at the back, and all the movement should be coming from your wrist. Your right forearm should be pressed against the top bit of the guitar’s body. When your pick reaches somewhere around the D string you’ll need to use your whole arm to move your hand wrist and pick toward the top strings, and vice a versa.
Your left hand should be fretting the notes with your finger tips only, avoid using the flats of your fingers. If you can imagine your hand like a claw with the knuckles pointing out and the fingertips coming in that’s about the right position.
You use fingers 1,2,3 and 4 to play the notes, once you get the pattern in mind just carry on all the way up the guitar neck.
Your thumb should be pointing upward pressed against the middle of the guitar neck. For me and for most people I have taught the thumb sits pretty naturally behind the second finger. Play in one position, and then as you move to the next position only then move your thumb sliding the whole hand along. In our example that means one movement every three bars.
This can be a television exercise in that if you sit in front of the television practising this it will help you get manoeuvrability into your four fingers, but ideally you need to practise this with the metronome, and really focus on staying in time and concentrating on when the beep is in relation to your fingers.
Have a look at the video that should help.
This is a great exercise to warm up or even to test your picking, see how fast you can go…