Guitar Scales / Finger Exercises

[john]

Hey

What scales/exercises do you use and how often do you practice them?

Cheers

John

[FinnArild]

I ususally kick off with "Blood on the Rooftops" then do "Horizons" and "Lost time in Cordoba" (All Steve Hackett) and then "Mood for a day" (another Steve: Howe). Done it for years now, and should probably try to learn some new pieces.

[Rudi]

Being essentially lazy I play the same patterns for most scales and just imagine the key changes. I generally play a scale as applied to a piece of music. If I’m doing chromatic passing tones I have to apply it to a specific tune. Occasionally I may put on a CD and play along.

Before a gig I try to spend an hour going over the stuff where I have solos. So when I get to play for real I still retain some of those ideas.

I play almost every day, if only for a few minutes. Though I often lose track of time and find I’ve spent a couple of hours or so.

[roxhythe]

An *hour*? I couldn't do that--my fingers wouldn't last the gig. In fact, I usually try not to play on a day I have a gig until it's time for the gig.

I use finger exercises mostly to test whether the guitar is in tune (like a tone-deaf person like me could tell without one of them electronic gizmos). Three, basically: I fingerpick the theme from "Alice's Restaurant"--about the only thing I fingerpick any more. I do the rhythm guitar part of a standard 12-bar blues riff in E--all on the bass strings, a little faster each time until I'm moving about twice as fast as when I started. And if I'm feeling really ambitious, I'll try to play "The Wreck of the Old 97" entirely with my left (fretboard) hand--trying to hit all the notes just by hammering on and pulling off, and not using a pick.

Somewhere between the start and the end of that exercise, I'm ready to play.

Joe

[john]

Hey Joe

How long are your gigs normally?

In the days when I used to gig, warm up wasn't a specific thing, just twiddling away on the strings for 10 minutes or so to get fluidity and feel flowing. To be honest my music was always more about feeling than technical feats. Normally twiddling entail playing excerpts from songs rather than scales.

I tend to keep scales for practice, and to be honest most of my practice techniques are not scales, more finger exercises like the spider crawl.

Cheers

John

[Nightwolf]

I never warmed up before a gig, I was afraid I would use up all the good notes. In fact we never practiced the night before, if we did it was a party type scene and we usually rocked the house, then played the gig like crap because we had used up all the good notes the night before. [smiley=acoustic.gif]

[john]

funnily enough it was the opposite way for me, in that all gigs ended in a party somewhere that involved a few guitars etc.

[roxhythe]

John, the gigs are usually 1 to 2 hours. I have enough original material now to fill 3 hours, but nobody's asked me to do that yet. (They may be scared. I have warned people I am better in small doses.)

Our Friday Night Group usually plays for a little over 2 hours; other organized jam sessions I've participated in may run as long as 4 hours. If I'm doing something like one of the bluegrass festivals, though, I'll expect to be playing constantly all the time I'm there, whether it's 2 days, 3 days, or whatnot. I will take a break from jamming only to play the paying gig. (And that's contrary to what I said above, I know, but I go to these things to play, and I want to play a lot. I'll be trying to build up the calluses on my fingers all year to be able to do just a couple of these things.)

Joe

Edited May 24, 2007 by roxhythe

[Rudi]

I have a gig tomorrow, and I hav’nt picked up the electric in 3 weeks, so a bit of practice will be pretty much essential tomorrow afternoon.

[darbs]

I try to play as much as I can the week of a gig and rest on the day of.

About 20 minutes before show time I start with some chromatic scales all the way up and down the neck.

Try to go thru a few of the solo's I play and then have ONE Jeager bomb to calm down. Anymore than that and I feel the crowd is getting jipped if I start to blow it.

Been playing gigs solidly, once a month, for 2 years now and I still get a case of the nerves right before ST...??

What ever works I guess...