Guitar Rote Exercise - Practice Fretting As Lightly As Possible

In this exercise, we practice calibrating the fret hand fingers pinch, or grip, or fretting strength.Show more

In particular, we are calibrating the fingers touch, from the point the finger touches the string, to the point the string is fretted just hard enough to sound good.

So, during this exercise, you really want to focus your attention on your fretting finger, as it touches the string, and slowly presses the string into the fret.

You’ll want to keep plucking the string over and over, so that your ear can really get a good listen to the sound change, as that string gets close to the fret, and touches the fret, and is pressed into the fret.

So as a beginner, we were told to fret hard, or fret harder, because we have weak fingers.

But now your fingers are too strong, and need to be calibrated again, for your current strength and conditioning level.

So, if we imagine that as we touch the string, the pressure we exert is at level 0, and the hardest we can fret is level 10,

And then as we exert more pressure, lets say to level 5, the string moves backward, and touches the fret, with pressure level 5.

Because pressure level 5 doesn’t sound quite as good as level 6, we practice fretting up to pressure level 6,

Instead of practicing with pressure level always set to 10 or even 11.

By practicing how to lighten up your touch, you will have many benefits, for example

1) you can play longer. You wont get fatigued as quickly

2) your blood pressure will lower. Relax!

3) you will be more nimble, and move from point to point on the fretboard more quickly and efficiently

4) you wont dent the back of your string on the frets

5) you won’t wear out your frets as fast

From an eagle eye view, this is a transitional exercise, from beginner guitar to intermediate guitar.

It indicates that you have mastered many smaller maneuvers, that you have played many notes, that you are stronger, and faster, and have more spatial awareness,...

As your body is strengthened and conditioned with these rote exercises,

you will now more easily overcome many obstacles that would have otherwise given you problems.

For example, because all of your fingers are now stronger, and each finger knows how to properly fret a note,

you then can more easily learn new chords, or riffs, etc that you would have struggled with with weak, disorganized, undisciplined fingers...

These exercises are the difference between learning a song on a guitar,

And learning how to fundamentally, completely play the guitar, as a musical instrument.

The difference between giving a man a fish, and teaching a man how to fish.

The difference between teaching a student how to play *a song,

and teaching a student how to play *any song, in any key...

Teaching a student how to read other peoples music,

Verses teaching a student how to write their own music.