Do this to get your fingers moving
Beginner Guitar Essentials Lesson 10
This series of lessons will set you up for success on the guitar. You’ll learn what to focus on as a beginner, what to ignore, and how to structure your practice so you can start using what you’re learning to play songs as quickly as possible!
The caterpillar exercise
The caterpillar exercise is the best exercise you can do on the guitar to improve your overall technique.
When you’re starting out a lot of your practice should have the objective of training your mind to think and see things correctly. This allows you to feed your muscle memory the correct movements. Your muscle memory can’t do anything wrong. It only repeats what you feed it, which is exactly what it’s supposed to do. Bad habits can form if you don’t pay attention to what you’re feeding it and it begins to repeat the wrong thing.
The caterpillar exercise is designed to improve your technique, so it’s really important that you pay attention to our movements. If you do, your muscle memory will get a sense of what it’s supposed to be doing and you’ll notice the good technique you are developing start to get expressed in all the other things you’re doing on the guitar as well!
Key points to keep in mind:
Use one finger per fret
Keep your index and pinky fingers both angled inwards
Keep your thumb half way down the neck behind your middle finger
Keep your palm horizontal
Keep the knuckles at the base of your fingers forward
If you’re doing this exercise correctly, you should be feeling it in the big muscle at the base of your thumb. Almost every issue student’s have with their left hand technique can be linked back to their ability to hold their thumb in this position correctly.
Don’t worry if it’s difficult or the muscle feels a little fatigued. Playing the guitar is a physical activity and you are actively trying to develop strength and dexterity in your hand. As long as you keep the points for good technique in mind (above) and make a conscious effort to move towards those, you’ll develop strength and dexterity and continue to move in the direction of good technique.
Enjoying the lessons?
This series of lessons is test footage from the first part of our upcoming beginner guitar course. These lessons are all from the first of 10 sections that will help you form a rock-solid foundation when you’re starting out as a beginner guitar player.
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In the next part of this lesson series, we’ll go over how to learn the notes on the fretboard and why it’s important.
A guitarist who has learned all the notes on the fretboard: Can more effectively learn scales and chords; Has a better understanding of keys, intervals, and scale degrees; Is able to more easily memorise songs; Has a greater capacity to understand music theory; Is more effectively able to develop their aural skills; Gets ‘lost’ far less frequently when they are improvising on the guitar.