training my ring finger for legato

[choubix]

hello,

I am practicing Legato but I find my ring finger really really stiff...
I am practicing with a metronome on my laptop but dont seem to improve.

I was wondering whether there were some "workouts" that would help me build: speed, accuracy (they more come from the metronome I think) while stretching my ring finger.

do you know a bout website with licks that could help me please?


(And no: I wont chop my finger off to play faster... )

[Ayrton]

Originally Posted by choubix

(And no: I wont chop my finger off to play faster... )

Wimp…

How are you ever going to get better with that attitude?

[mi2tom]

Practise hammer on and pull of using your pinky

[panther]

There is actually a nice lick from Satriani's Hordes of Locusts, which is quite simple but still suffices to make my fingers hurt after a few seconds:

E |----------------------------------
B |-- 6h7p6---------6h7p6---------
G |----------7h8p7---------7h8p7-- ...and so on...
D |----------------------------------
A |----------------------------------
E |----------------------------------

Use your middle and ring fingers for the G string (index and middle finger on B), and try do play this for a minute at a decend speed (as fast as you can so it still sounds good, etc). At least, you'll get the ring finger used to doing some real work....

[wilch]

I have the same problem... or a similar one atleast.

Ring finger with index finger by itself is fine. Same with pinkie with index finger. But then pinkie, ring, and index... pain

pinkie, middle, and index = fine.. flayle away... but pinkie and ring... pain pain pain.

[choubix]

ring + pinkie is a pain...

I'll give the chop a try with a metronome.

I am trying this right now:

E |---8p5h6h8p6p5h8---------------
B |------------------8p5h6h8p6p5h8
G |---------------------------------and so on...
D |----------------------------------
A |----------------------------------
E |----------------------------------

I also swap 6 by 7 to work on the ring finger...
maybe working slower would be a good idea.

what's the best to improve? (start at XX bpm? and increment by how many?)

I also found that video of "hordes of locust" on youtube:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXiKdUFIRV4

that song will definitely end up in my "I need to play it" list...

[panther]

Start slow, maybe at 60 or even lower, in my example you could make triplets out of the three-note groups, so you'd play three notes every beat. Playing really slow evenly is not that easy, either.
If you feel comfortable at your current speed, and everything sounds good, increment the tick, e.g. in steps of 8, and play until you're comfortable at that speed, and repeat the cycle until you can't keep it up any more. In that case, you should back down a few iterations, and slowly work your way up from there. Also, if you've a target speed in mind (for a certain song for example), you can increase the tick step by step above the target speed, which will give you additional confidence for the real thing.
This is the way you're supposed to do it, and almost every professional guitar player probably will confirm this method greatly increased their chops. That said, I don't really practice like that, you need a lot of persistence and motivation to pull it through. In my case, just fiddling around on some evenings, motivation for this kind of exercise is at premium. HAD I practiced like that for the last ten years, though, I'd probably be about 20 times better than I am now ;-)

Hordes of Locusts is one of my favourite tracks from Satch - but I don't like the above video very much, the guy isn't playing too cleanly... Joe's 'Dreaming #11' has a nice live version on it, iirc...