The 1243 Exercise on Guitar
In this video we're learning the 1243 exercise on guitar to build up strength, speed and accuracy!
We’re going to walk through this simple, but effective, exercise to improve your playing!
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Transcription
Today we're going to work on the 1243 exercise, which is basically going to help us with building finger control, finger strength, and all that fun stuff. Now it is basically the same as the 1234 exercise. But different finger order, so we can work on our control. And if you haven't watched the 1234 exercise video, shame on you! We’ll demonstrate quickly how it works here. I like to start up in the higher fret numbers, maybe at like the 9 or the 7 We'll do it in the 7 And the 1243 refer to your finger numbers going index, middle, pinky, ring, so that's 1243 So that’l be frets 7, 8, 10, 9 And that's basically the whole exercise. But the trick is to be able to do it in rhythm and getting it quick. So you want to make sure your notes are sounding really good. And just getting it on one string at a time. Before moving on to any kind of like, changing strings in rhythm or anything like that. So when you can comfortably do all six strings by themselves then you try to go up and down all of the strings at one fret. Now remember, this is about control. So if you got to go slow to start, like if your brand new to an exercise like this, you know, go slow. Try to keep it in rhythm though. You also want to keep that pick going down, up, down, up the whole time. Even when you do change strings. When you’re changing strings keep it down, up, down, up. Down, up, down, up… And so on. And notice when I do it, I'm keeping my fingers really close to the strings. I'm keeping them hovered over them. I'm not going to have them way out like this as I go. I want to try to keep them close to the fretboard and the strings so that I can drop them quickly. And just to make things extra clear here, the red numbers are finger numbers, index, middle, pinky, ring, and then repeat index, middle, pinky, ring. And then these are our fret numbers, 7, 8, 10, 9 So like I was saying before, first you start with just one string until it's comfortable. Then you add a next one, but you try to change them keeping the rhythm. And you can rotate between them. When you find that you can go up and down all of the strings pretty well, that's when we want to travel it. Going up and down the fretboard. First with just one string, but we're going to go back fret numbers to start and then back up. So for example, we'll go to 7 to 6 to 5 to 4 and so on. We're going to go 7, 8, 10, 9, 6, 7, 9, 8, 5, 6, 8, 7 and so on. And when you get to that 1, you want to go back up. And so on. You can go up and down, up and down, doing that with all the six strings. Then what you want to do is change frets while going up and down the strings. So again, we'll start here. When I get to the top, I'm going to go back a fret and down. And back a fret and up. And you just keep going down and you can keep going back up. It's all about keeping rhythm, getting nice sounding notes and finger control. If the notes don't sound good or the rhythm's broken, then you're not doing it right clearly. So slow down, make sure it sounds good. Now just work on getting that speed faster, getting those fingers real confident, moving really good. So that you can control them really well and just have a good time with it. If you like the video, give it a like! If you want to learn more guitar we'd love to have you, please subscribe! Have a good time and Happy Practicing!