Guitar Exercises For Dummies
Overview
A guitar-playing practice guide with hundreds of warm-up and technique-building exercises
If you already play some guitar but need some practice, you're in the right place. Guitar Exercises For Dummies is a friendly guide that provides just enough need-to-know information about practicing scales, chords, and arpeggios in the context of specific skills and techniques to help you maximize its 400+ exercises and improve your guitar playing. (If you need instruction on topics like buying or tuning a guitar and playing basic chords, check out Guitar For Dummies.)
This practical book starts off with warm-up exercises (on and off-instrument) and then logically transitions to scales, scale sequences, arpeggios, arpeggio sequences, and chords, with a focus on building strength and consistency as well as refining technique. Each section helps you to practice correct hand and body posture and experience variations, such as fingering options and hand positions, and then ends with a brief musical piece for you to try. You can also practice
incorporating other facets of musical performance in your exercises, such as:
- Tempo
- Time signature
- Phrasing
- Dynamics
The book wraps up with tips to help you maximize your practice time (like setting goals for each session), ways to improve your musicianship (such as studying other performers’ body language), and an appendix that explains the accompanying website (where you can find audio tracks and additional information). Grab your guitar, grab a copy of Guitar Exercises For Dummies, and start perfecting your finger picking today.
P.S. If you think this book seems familiar, you're probably right. The Dummies team updated the cover and design to give the book a fresh feel, but the content is the same as the previous release of Guitar Exercises For Dummies (9780470387665). The book you see here shouldn't be considered a new or updated product. But if you're in the mood to learn something new, check out some of our other books. We're always writing about new topics!
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About The Author
Mark Phillips is a guitarist, arranger, author, and editor with more than 30 years in music publishing.
Jon Chappell is a multi-style guitarist, arranger, author, and journalist, and former editor of Guitar magazine.
Sample Chapters
guitar exercises for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
When you’re practicing guitar, use these diagrams to show the finger positions to play major and minor scales, as well as the notes on the neck of your guitar. The latter will help you change starting notes in chords, scales, and arpeggios.Guitar neck diagrams for major and minor scalesWhen practicing guitar, use these miniature neck diagrams to remind yourself exactly where to position your left-hand fingers.
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Chords are a big part of guitar playing, but the motion involved is somewhat different from playing single notes. If you’re going to practice chords, it makes sense to warm up with chord-based exercises, such as the ones in the following figures.
When playing chords, the fingers each play separate strings, but they move all at the same time as you switch chords.
Guitar
A guitar arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Seventh chords sound richer and more complex than basic major and minor chords, and they’re prevalent in many types of music, including jazz, pop, classical, rock, and blues.You can derive a dominant seventh chord in different ways, but here’s how you should do it for now: Start with a major scale and play 1, 3, 5, b7.
Guitar
An arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. Seventh chords and arpeggios sound richer and more complex than basic major and minor chords, and they’re prevalent in many types of music, including jazz, pop, classical, rock, and blues.
You can derive a dominant seventh chord in different ways, but here’s how you should do it for now: Start with a major scale and play 1, 3, 5, b7.
When you’re practicing guitar, use these diagrams to show the finger positions to play major and minor scales, as well as the notes on the neck of your guitar. The latter will help you change starting notes in chords, scales, and arpeggios.Guitar neck diagrams for major and minor scalesWhen practicing guitar, use these miniature neck diagrams to remind yourself exactly where to position your left-hand fingers.
Guitar
When practicing guitar, use these miniature neck diagrams to remind yourself exactly where to position your left-hand fingers. The headings include the scale formulas; use them to help you understand the scales’ makeup and how they compare to other scales, regardless of key. The circled dot in each diagram indicates the tonic or root of a scale or chord, which helps you find the starting note for any movable scale, arpeggio, or chord.
If you know how to play your melodic minor scales, you won't have any problem learning to play Handel's "Allegro" on guitar. The opening statement in this piece is just an ascending scale, although it is disguised with different rhythms. The faster notes in bars 5 through 7 are all just descending scale segments, but do note how beautiful they sound.
“Amadeus’s Air” is a guitar exercise taken from a Mozart composition (a piano concerto). It's based on ascending arpeggios (using patterns #1, #2, and #3). This guitar piece is a little trickier to play because the patterns don’t start on the beat. Instead, they start after a sixteenth rest. Also, it uses seven-note patterns covering all six strings.
There are two famous versions of “Ave Maria” — one by Bach and Gounod and one by Schubert. Playing the Schubert piece on guitar will give you a chance to see how a dominant seventh chord arpeggio goes well with major and minor arpeggios. Schubert’s piece is made up of mostly major and minor chords, but when the dominant seventh chord arpeggios come in, they almost announce themselves.
The form of “Blues Riff in B” is the classic 12-bar blues, but it’s played the rock ’n’ roll way, which is in a straight-eighth feel (not a shuffle or swing). In the guitar tablature below, you’ll notice some nice syncopations in the odd-numbered bars and in bar 10. These syncopations give the progression a slight kick and make it fun to play.
“Doo-Wop Groove in A” for guitar features a slow, relaxed feel. This song, which is shown in the following figure, uses major arpeggio patterns 1, 2, 3, and 4. These patterns should be played in a flowing, legato style. You may notice that patterns 1, 2, and 4 correspond to the movable barre chords based on the open chords E, G, and C.
Guitar
Despite the fact that “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” is in a minor key, it’s quite a spirited and uplifting Christmas tune. When you look at the guitar tablature below, you'll see that the key signature has no sharps or flats, so you may think that the song is in C major. But it’s actually in A minor, which shares the same key signature and notes as C major.
"Liebestraum," which means “dream of love,” is one of Franz Liszt’s slower pieces. Playing this slow-moving, static melody on guitar helps highlight the interesting, flavorful chords Liszt places behind it.
Franz Liszt was a Hungarian-born German Romantic composer who was also a virtuoso pianist — some say the greatest pianist of all time.
Learning to play Bach's "Minuet in G" on guitar will give you a chance to use all your scale practicing in a real song. J.S. Bach, a composer who lived and wrote during the Baroque era (1600–1750), originally wrote “Minuet in G” as a simple piano piece for student pianists (a group that included his wife). Despite its simplicity, the song’s melody has become universal.
"Mozart's Motif" is an arpeggio exercise that's drawn from his Piano Sonata No. 1 in C Major. What’s interesting here is that when you play "Mozart's Motif" on guitar, you have the chance to use sequences in two ways. Notice the smaller, descending two-note sequences that progress upward by chord tones to the octave, and you'll also notice the longer one-bar sequences (ten notes total) that occur between the measures.
Playing "Oh, Dem Golden Slippers" on guitar gives you a chance to practice a variety of scale patterns and sequences. When you look at the beginning of the music for “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” notice the elements that give you clues to the song’s character: tempo marking, time signature, key signature, and dynamics.
Learning to play Fauré’s “Pavane” on guitar gives you a chance to practice your arpeggio patterns. In fact, the song uses 14 of them, including various forms of the three types of seventh chords — dominant seventh, minor seventh, and major seventh.
Gabriel Fauré was a French composer who wrote beautiful pieces using a rich palette of harmonic material, much of it based on seventh chords.
Playing "Retreat" on guitar is a great way to practice your major arpeggio patterns. “Retreat,” in this case, doesn’t mean “let’s get the heck out of here.” Instead, it’s used to signal the end of the official day. As you can imagine, this tune’s mood is mellower than the rousing “Reveille” and a bit more informal than the stately “To the Colors.
“The First Noël” is a Christmas carol that you probably know, so you can use your familiarity with it to help ensure that you’re playing the song correctly on guitar — hitting the right pitches and in the correct rhythms.You use two major scale patterns to play “The First Noël”: major scale patterns #1 and #4, discussed elsewhere.
Here is a renamed Gaelic song whose original title, “The Cruiskeen Lawn,” roughly translates to “The Full Little Jug.” Play this song on guitar using harmonic minor scale pattern #3 in 2nd position.
The sequences shown in the music span four bars, so they take longer to repeat than some of the more common two-bar phrases.
If you’re old enough, you may recognize “The Three Ravens” from the Peter, Paul, and Mary version of this folk song. Playing "The Three Ravens" on guitar gives you a chance to practice your harmonic minor scale. The key signature in the music tells you that this song is in F minor, but because you’re using the harmonic minor scale, every instance of the note E will be E natural, not Eb as indicated by the key signature.
Learning to play "To Work upon the Railroad" on guitar gives you a chance to put those natural minor scales to work. The song “To Work upon the Railroad” is also known by its Gaelic title, “Filimiooriooriay.” But we couldn’t pronounce that title, let alone tell you what it means. So we named our version according to a lyric that repeats in the song.
To play "To the Colors" on guitar, you use major arpeggio patterns #1 and #2. “To the Colors” is played to honor the nation, as in a salute to the “colors,” or flag. This tune is given the same respect in a military setting as the national anthem.
This piece contains a dotted eighth note followed by a sixteenth note, which gives the music a kind of buoyant feel.
Robert Schumann was a brilliant but troubled composer from the Romantic era. His wife, Clara, was a famous pianist who performed many of her husband’s works. Schumann felt that his small hands limited him as a pianist, so he devised a contraption to try to stretch out his hands. It ended up causing an injury that prevented him from performing, and many people speculate that out of bitterness he composed pieces that are fiendishly difficult to play.
“Wolfgang’s Whistle” was adapted from a Mozart piano sonata. Learning to play "Wolfgang's Whistle" on guitar gives you a great chance for practicing minor arpeggios; it contains major arpeggios, too. Actual pieces of music often mix minor and major, so this is a chance to hear how the two qualities interact.
As you can see in the following music, “Wolfgang’s Whistle” uses minor arpeggio patterns #1 through #4.
Guitar
"Ave Maria" is a beautiful piece of music composed entirely of arpeggios. This makes it the perfect choice for practicing your guitar chords and arpeggio patterns. One of Bach’s most famous compositions is his “Prelude No. 1” from The Well-Tempered Clavier. But 137 years after it was written, the French Romantic composer Charles Gounod came along and composed a melody to go on top of the chords.
The lovely Irish ballad “Danny Boy” is actually based on an old traditional melody called “Londonderry Air.” And if you’ve ever checked out the derrieres in London, you can see why they changed the title. [Rim shot.] The lyrics were added later, as a poignant message from a father to his absent son.
To play “Danny Boy” on guitar, play slowly and gently, and try to make the one-beat chord changes (which occur in bars 8, 9, 11, 12, 14, 15, and 16) sound smooth and unrushed.
Guitar
"Look for the Silver Lining" on guitar makes great use of inside chords. Jerome Kern wrote “Look for the Silver Lining” for an all-but-forgotten musical called Sally, but most people who know this call to optimism are familiar with the versions sung by Judy Garland or jazz trumpet great Chet Baker.
Play this song moderately slowly, and try to let the chords that last only one beat (such as the Am7 and D7 chords in bar 1) sound as legato as the chords that receive two beats.
Guitar
You can play a lot of guitar music if you've memorized the five major scale patterns. The best way to practice major scale patterns for guitar is to practice playing them in position (meaning that the left-hand fingers cover four consecutive frets). This kind of practice exercise will help get your fingers used to the many different major scale patterns available.
Guitar tablature, or just tab for short, is a notation system that graphically represents the frets and strings of the guitar. Tab is guitar-specific, and it tells you what string and fret to play. Use the tab if you’re ever unsure as to which fret or string a note falls on.
Music for guitar usually comes either in tab or with two staffs, one using standard music notation (the one with the treble clef), with a tab staff just beneath it, like most of the examples of guitar music you'll find on this site.
An arpeggio is when you play the individual notes of a chord one at a time rather than all at once. Arpeggios are extremely helpful for improvising.Major arpeggio pattern #2 starts with the 4th finger on the 6th string and includes no out-of-position notes, so you can enjoy a stretch-free series of exercises for a while!
An arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Playing major arpeggios on guitar prepares you for music with major chords — and, of course, for music that employs major arpeggios. With arpeggios, you think in chords, but you play the notes separately.
An arpeggio is sort of the exploded view of a chord. You play one note of the chord at a time rather than all at once.
Major arpeggio pattern #4
The following figure shows major arpeggio pattern #4 in the key of F major in both a neck diagram and in music and tab format. Practice this pattern slowly, without worrying about the rhythm, until you can play all the notes equally well.
Guitar
A guitar arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Seventh chords sound richer and more complex than basic major and minor chords, and they’re prevalent in many types of music, including jazz, pop, classical, rock, and blues.You can derive a major seventh chord in many different ways.
Guitar
A guitar arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Seventh chords sound richer and more complex than basic major and minor chords, and they’re prevalent in many types of music, including jazz, pop, classical, rock, and blues.You can derive a major seventh chord in many different ways.
A guitar arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Minor arpeggios can be applied to music in minor keys and in major keys that contain minor chords. That includes just about everything! When the music you’re playing calls for a minor chord, you can play a minor chord, or you can use a minor arpeggio for a different texture.
A guitar arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Minor arpeggios can be applied to music in minor keys and in major keys that contain minor chords. That includes just about everything! When the music you’re playing calls for a minor chord, you can play a minor chord, or you can use a minor arpeggio for a different texture.
An arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Minor arpeggios can be applied to guitar music in minor keys and in major keys that contain minor chords. That includes just about everything! When the music you’re playing calls for a minor chord, you can play a minor chord, or you can use a minor arpeggio for a different texture.
A guitar arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Minor arpeggios can be applied to music in minor keys and in major keys that contain minor chords. That includes just about everything! When the music you’re playing calls for a minor chord, you can play a minor chord, or you can use a minor arpeggio for a different texture.
Guitar
A guitar arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Seventh chords sound richer and more complex than basic major and minor chords, and they’re prevalent in many types of music, including jazz, pop, classical, rock, and blues.
Minor seventh chords can be derived in different ways, but one way is to start with a major scale and play 1, b3, 5, b7.
Guitar
A guitar arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord. Seventh chords sound richer and more complex than basic major and minor chords, and they’re prevalent in many types of music, including jazz, pop, classical, rock, and blues.Minor seventh chords can be derived in different ways, but one way is to start with a major scale and play 1, b3, 5, b7.
Use this 12-fret neck diagram when practicing guitar to show you the notes in letter names for all the frets on all six guitar strings up to and including the 12th fret. It can help you move any scale, arpeggio, or chord to a different starting note. For example, if you want to move an A major scale that starts on the 6th string, 5th fret, to play an E% major scale, simply move your hand up the neck (toward the bridge) and place your starting finger on the 6th string, 11th fret.
Guitar
You can play a lot of music on guitar simply by memorizing five major scale patterns, and the best way to memorize anything is to practice. The following practice exercises will help you to learn major scale pattern #3 on guitar.
Once you learn the major scale patterns, you can play them in many different ways — applying the best pattern for the situation or by changing keys while maintaining a pattern.
Guitar
You can play a lot of music on guitar simply by memorizing five major scale patterns and the best way to memorize anything is to practice. The following practice exercises will help you to learn major scale pattern #4.
Once you learn the major scale patterns, you can play them in many different ways — applying the best pattern for the situation or by changing keys while maintaining a pattern.
Guitar
You can play a lot of music on guitar simply by memorizing five major scale patterns, and the best way to memorize anything is to practice. The following guitar practice exercises will help you learn major scale pattern #5.
Once you learn the major scale patterns, you can play them in many different ways — by applying the best pattern for the situation or by changing keys while maintaining a pattern.
Guitar
You can play a lot of guitar music by simply memorizing five major scale patterns, and the best way to memorize anything is to practice. The following practice exercises will help you to learn major scale pattern #2 on guitar.
Once you learn the major scale patterns, you can play them in many different ways — applying the best pattern for the situation or by changing keys while maintaining a pattern.
An arpeggio is a chord whose notes are played one at a time instead of simultaneously. It’s sort of the exploded view of a chord (kind of like the pictures you see in the owner’s manual to a piece of build-it-yourself furniture).
It won’t surprise you that in Italian, the word arpeggio means “broken chord.
The point of a warm-up is to get your hands and fingers moving on the guitar from a cold start. Physically, you’re simply stretching the muscles (or muscle-tendon units) and enabling blood to flow more freely through them. You don’t need to play a masterpiece to do that. In fact, you shouldn’t play anything too taxing, strenuous, or complicated when warming up.
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