My Favourite Painful Exercise!

I’d like to call it ‘The Spider Exercise’. If there is an actual official name for this, please let me know! Came on this idea when watching guitarist Dave Mustaine from Megadeth explaining his ‘spider chords’, on which I use some parts of his power chord idea to come up with this!

Basically a pentatonic like exercise, but with some added string switching. It’s similar to playing 8-10-9-11 on each string, going from E to A, D and G., but with added spice.

Anyone else got some painful or spicy exericses to keep the fretting hand pumping? :slight_smile:

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I dont get it. can you ID which fret fingers are used for each note. Are you playing multiple stings at once?

It’s basically a scale you play. It’s similar to playing a pentatonic scale with just your index (1) and ringfinger (3), but going from E to A, you switch fingers, playing with the middle finger (2) and the pinky (4).

To make it clear, the numbers are NOT the order in which you play, but the fingers used.

So, in this example:

  • First, on the E string you play fret 8 with your index (1) and fret 10 with your ringfinger (3)
  • Next, on the A string you play the 9th fret with your middlefinger (2) and the 11th fret with your pinky
  • Next, the same you did on the E string, but then on the D string
  • Lastly, the same you did on the A string, but on the G string.

Hopefully that’ll make it clear :slight_smile:

got it - thanks. After thinking about it I got the scale part but not the fingers.
To answer your question - Mark makes this look easy but . . .

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I believe Mark has a similar exercise (which inspired my exercise) about finger independence/reducing flying fingers.

Basically it’s a walk on all strings (from E to G) and playing:
8-8-10-10-9-9-11-11. Mine is quite tougher, since I added string switching in between.

I personally started with the former. With your fretting hand it would be:
Index-Index-Ring-Ring-Middle-Middle-Pinky-Pinky. Try that first before punishing yourself :slight_smile:

Of course you can (like mark) start of the 5th fret. Then it’s:
5-5-7-7-6-6-8-8.