SHOW ME THE MAGIC EXERCISE! BLOG POST BY JASON OLSON

I hear this a lot from my “Shredder” students. Show me the best exercise in the world for improving my speed and dexterity with scale passages. I certainly understand this desire! It would be great to have one “all encompassing” exercise to work on in order to play faster and cleaner. In truth, however, there is no such thing. The reality is that playing fast simply takes a lot of practice and patience. My response to the “Magic Exercise” request is that there are many excellent and useful exercises. The secret, of course, is putting in the time and effort. There is no free lunch. With that being said, here is one of my favorite picking exercises. The basic design of this exercise can be used with any scale for improving your picking technique. I have illustrated it using a simple chromatic scale in the 5th position, but, try others! The idea is that you are practicing the coordination of the right and left hands at two different rates of change finally matching them up to a 1:1 ratio. What I mean is… at first the right hand is playing four notes for every one note the left hand plays. This makes it relatively easy for the right hand to play fast without having perfect coordination with the left. As you reduce the ratio of right hand notes to left, that coordination becomes more difficult. Of course all of the normal exercise approaches apply: Start slow, use good right and left hand positioning, be sure to play cleanly (don’t practice sloppy).