Scale & Warmup Exercises by Bert Casey is a free lesson for bluegrass guitar. These exercises are intended to improve your flatpicking skills. We'll first cover a basic G scale and then work on some alternate picking exercises that will help build up your right hand speed. After you have finished working with these exercises, try moving on to our Speed & Finger Exercises video lesson by Curtis Jones.
Most lead bluegrass guitar playing or flatpicking is based on the G scale. You need to memorize this scale.
Once you are comfortable with the G Scale, try this 4 note ascending exercise. This is used in parts quite often in flatpicking. Pay particular attention to the right hand pick direction. It is very important to master the down up picking technique.
After you are comfortable with the 4 note ascending exercise, try the 4 note descending exercise.
Try incorporating these scales and exercises into your playing. You should always warm up before trying to play songs and scales and scale exercises are a great way to improve your technique. Also try playing along with the bluegrass tracks from the Let's Jam CD. These scales will fit almost anywhere.
Speed & Finger Exercises by Curtis Jones is a downloadable Quicktime video lesson about building speed for playing bluegrass guitar. The key to playing faster is consistency and stamina. Curtis will show you some of his favorite drills for increasing hand and finger strength, dexterity, and speed. A .pdf with the tablature for each exercise is also included in the download. $4.99
Watch sample clips: Quicktime or Flash
