guitar-warm-up-exercises

Hey everyone, Simple Steve here with a not so simple warm up exercise using the major scale.

I include some basic theory behind what were doing here, but if you don't understand what I say at first, don't worry.

Just study and play the notes on the tabs and you can always get more info about the theory part of it later if you want.

Remember it's only important to know the theory behind what we do on the guitar if - you - want to know it, or if your goal is to know as much as you can about music.

For these exercises you will need to know how to play the major scale in the closed position . so if you don't -- go learn it and come back to this later.

picking
Play all these exercise using all down strokes or alternate picking.

I have 4 exercises for this scale. Learn one at at a time. These should keep you busy for a while if your still in the beginner or even intermediate stage.

The scale I'm using for these examples is the G major scale starting at the third fret. But once you learn it at this fret you can move the whole thing to any other fret.

Fingering: Remember that each fret gets a finger. When playing the G Major scale pattern between the second and fifth frets, we start the scale using our second finger at the third fret.

This means that any note that is on the 2nd fret of any string, we will use our 1st finger, anything on the 3rd fret well use our 2nd finger, any note on the 4th fret we use our 3rd finger and any notes on the 5th fret we will use our 4th finger.

The G major scale has all natural notes except the "F" is a F#-sharp. on the fourth string at the fourth fret. G A B C D E F# G.

The first example we will play the scale one octave. That means from the low G to the next "G", 12 half steps away, or since we are talking about scales ---   it's 8 notes of the scale away.
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 - 8.

Instead of playing up the scale one note after the next in order like usual,    we will do it in intervals of three or thirds. Interval is a fancy name for spaces between notes.

In the first exercise we start on the the low G at the 3rd fret of the 6th string, and play up to the third note away from it in the scale. This note is the the "B" on the 5th string - second fret.

Next we go to the second note of the scale, the "A" on the fifth fret using our 4th finger. Then we go up three notes away from that to land on "C".

We follow this pattern until we get to the "G", one octave away, on the 4th string at the 5th fret. Then we can either stop there if we want, or we can begin our way back the same way as shown in the tabs.

Exercise 2 is the same thing except we go up 2 octaves this time to the "G" on the first string at the 3rd fret.

This gets a little tricky because we use our pinky a lot.

Exercise 3 is almost the same but we alter the pattern a little by playing three notes up the scale, then going back to the first note, then up three more and back the second note of the scale and up three more from that point and so on.

This sounds more confusing than it it really is, I just don't know how to explain it any easier than that, even though I'm "simple Steve".

Just study the tabs slowly and you'll figure it out.

In Exercise 4 we break up the scale into intervals again.
I show 3 examples on the tab staff, each has a repeat bar after it so you keep repeating it until you want to stop.

In the exercise, we "arpeggiate" it by just playing those 3 notes. Arpeggios break up a chord or a scale.

When we arpeggiate a chord, we play each note of the chord one string at a time instead of all the strings at once like a strum.

Arpaggiating a scale is a little different. We call that sweep picking.

In this example we break up the scale into intervals or certain key notes that we want to play

The first section is the 1st - 3rd and 5th notes of the scale, also known as the degrees of the scale. In the chords section we learned that the chords have degrees as well. The chords come out of the scales.

Remember a chord is 3 or more notes.

These 3 notes are the formula we use to make major chords.

All major chords will be made up of the 1- 3 and 5 notes or degrees of the scale.
G -B - D is the G major chord. Also known as the "tonic chord"

Next we add the 7th degree of the scale in the mix and arpeggiate that.

This formula makes up a major 7th chord if we play all these notes together in a chord. G-B-D-F#.

The last section adds the 9th of the scale. Now you say "what's the 9th"? We didn't talk about no 9th.

Ok, the ninth would be the note right after we go up the scale to the 8th note or first octave - G.

So after the octave of the scale, "G" which is the 8th note, we get the ninth note which is " A " on the 3rd string- 2nd fret.

Not to confuse you but the ninth could also be thought of as the 2nd because it would be the second note of the scale as well if we start the scale from the top. They are both "A", in the G Major scale.

If we were to play all these notes together in a chord, we would have a Major 9th chord.
G - A - B - F# - A.   Gmajor 9.

Exercise 5
This is a simple finger exercise using the minor pentatonic scale pattern.

Guitar exercises - L2