Thought of a good finger warm-up

[Matthew_84]

Hello fellow TBers,

So I just thought of a good warm-up for the fingers. There's really nothing musical to it, but I think it is good for getting blood flowing to all of the fingers.

I'll describe it the best way that I can, and I'll be describing it for a 4-string. So when you see me refer to the E or G string, I simple mean the lowest or highest string that I have available.

Start maybe near the 9th fret (as the frets are closer together and less strain on your hand) of the E string (lowest string). Set your metronome to about 40 BPM, maybe a bit more, and play the following notes as 16ths.

- Fret the 9th fret of the E with your index finger
- Fret the 11th fret of the E string with your ring finger
- Fret the 9th fret of the A string with your index finger
- Fret the 11th fret of the A string with your ring finger (so you move to the next strings and only use your index-ring in this pattern. Your final note in this sequence will be your ring finger on the 11th fret of the G string).
- Move back to the E string, but now fret the 9th fret with your index, and then fret the 10th fret with your middle finger, and work your way to the G string.
- Now, come back to the E and play the 10th fret with your middle, but the 12th with your pinky, and work your way to the G string.
- Come back to the E string and fret the 11th fret with your ring and then the 12th with your pinky, work your way to the G string.
- Come back to the E string again but fret the 9th fret with your index and the 12th fret with your pinky and go to the G string.
- Then go back to the E and fret the 10th fret with your middle and the 11th fret with your ring and go to G.
- You should end up with your ring finger on the 11th fret of the G string. Now do the same pattern as above but reverse it, so you start with your ring on the 11th fret of the G string and then the index on the 9th fret of the G string and work your way to E string.
- continue with the middle-index; pinky-middle; pinky-ring; pinky-index; ring-middle, all going from the G string to the E string.
- Once you complete this whole cycle, repeat it 3 more times.

Your fingers should be warmed up now. But it would help strenghten your hand if you increased the BPMs on the metronome, or even moved to a lower position on the neck.

It likely would have been easier to post a clip of me explaining this, but anyways, I hope I explained this well. If you have any questions regarding it and got confused anywhere along the way, just let me know.

I've seen variations of this, I saw Nathen East basically do the exact same thing in one of his videos, but I changed it a bit. And I like it a lot, and I hope you do too.

Thanks,

Matt

EDIT TO ADD: So I just realized that doing this at 40 BPM 4 times through only takes about 2 minutes to do. So maybe boost up the tempo to a moderate speed, do it 4 times, and then go up to a quick tempo and do it another 4 times. Make sure that you do it cleanly everytime though. If you aren't playing it cleanly, don't raise them tempo until you can do it cleanly.