Tag: right hand exercise

Six String Journal’s Complete Technique Course on Sale

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Have some time to work on your technique over the holidays? Through December, my course Complete Technique for Classical Guitar will be on sale through Six String Journal’s Podia page. Use this COUPONCODE for a 20% discount.

Six String Journal’s Complete Technique for Classical Guitar Course was developed for the advancing beginner with some experience, the advancing intermediate guitarist, and will even benefit those with lots of playing experience. Though music theory isn’t necessary, a rudimentary understanding of rhythm is helpful.

The course consists of primary movement videos where I will teach the foundational movements that you’ll need in order to master classical guitar. These videos cover topics such as free-stroke, rest-stroke, arpeggios, alternation, scales, hand coordination, slurs, and shifts. These are followed by several series of secondary videos where I’ll apply the techniques and movements in various ways to help you engrain them into your own practice. Stringing the secondary videos into a sequence will teach you how to form an effective practice routine that will maximize your results and get you closer to your musical goals.

Course Includes

  • Hours of focused technique lessons with an award-winning classical guitarist, the founder of Six String Journal, and sought-after educator. 
  • Over 50 extensively detailed but digestible videos demonstrating essential foundational movements, technique tips, exercises, routines, and how to implement them into your practice, carefully edited in small bite size videos for easy assimilation and viewing.
  • Printable PDF summarizing the entire course with a condensed visual of the material presented. 
  • Loads of bonus content from Six String Journal’s Mastering Diatonic Scales.

The Keys to Right Hand Control

Published on by Leo GarciaLeave a comment

In the videos below, I go through a progression of movements in the right hand that lead to better control of both rest stroke and free stroke. Grab your guitar and follow along. Hope this helps!

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Practicing Basic Four String Arpeggios

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In this video I talk about practicing the six basic four string arpeggios with four right hand fingers and the importance of planting for beginners. Planting will stabilize the right hand and will help deepen your hand’s relationship to the span of the strings.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the youtube channel. I’m putting more stuff that is not linked right away to Six String Journal. Leave a comment if you have questions!

Hope it helps!

Great Exercise for Building Your Right Hand Skills

Published on by Leo Garcia1 Comment

by Leo Garcia, © 2022

If you’ve been working on right hand arpeggios or etudes and find that alternation between m and a is not as comfortable as i and m (or i and a) then you’ve come to the right place. The exercises below will help remedy this problem. Simply because of our hand anatomy, independence between m and a is more difficult to develop, so I often suggest adding a bit of extra mama to the basic patterns most students use to develop their right hand position and their arpeggios. Adding a little bit extra mama consistently will pay off over the course of weeks, so keep at it.

Here are the six patterns I encourage students to practice regularly:

Here is pima with extra mama (I like to add some activity in the left hand but it is not necessary):

pima + mama

Continue through the other patterns in a similar way. As always, use a metronome, strive for a consistent sound, and relax your right hand.

piam + amam

pmia + mama

piam + amam

pami + mama or amam

paim + amam

Good luck!

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Leo Garcia

The Best Right Hand Exercise You are Not Doing

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The Best Right Hand Exercise You are Not Doing by Leo Garcia

If you’ve worked through both Part 1 and Part 2 to improve your right hand confidence, you can add this exercise to the bunch. I teach this one to students who are working on developing tremolo. But, it’s very useful for mastering the subtlety of string crossing with other right-hand fingerings. Use it to develop your basic right-hand fingerings im, mi, am, ma, ia, ai in both rest and free stroke, and pi, pm, pa for free stroke. Then try the basic pattern for tremolo pami or even go nutty with ami and ima. : )

Don’t forget to start slowly, with a metronome, and enjoy discovering which right-hand fingerings are your strongest and which ones need work.

Creeping Tremolo Exercise

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Improve Your Right Hand Confidence, Part 2

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Improve Your Right Hand Confidence, Part 2 by Leo Garcia

The most important movements to confident right hand technique include alternation between pairs and groups of fingers and how these fingers move across strings. Now we’ll take the idea a bit further than we did in Part 1. Remember to use these exercises consistently as part of your daily warm-up. Try the next several exercises using various speeds and the most common right hand fingerings: im, mi, am, ma in both rest stroke and free stroke. If you have extra time, add in the following fingerings in free stroke: ia, ai, ami, pi, pm, pa.

Here are several key practice points:

  1. Strive to play with a sense of pulse, resisting the urge to play every note with the same intensity.
  2. Focus on the quality of sound and whether it is consistent from finger to finger.
  3. When not using thumb (p), rest it lightly on the lower string adjacent to the string that is played. Experiment with resting it two or three strings away and sense the subtlety of how it influences the alternating fingers.
  4. Stay close to the strings.
  5. Use a metronome. Record your progress in terms of tempo.

Exercise 1

Exercise 2

Exercise 3

The following exercises shift the downbeat after the crossing. Maintaining a sense of pulse for the quarter note is essential to reap the benefits of this exercise. Keep focus on the downbeat. Again, use a metronome and work on basic right hand fingerings im, mi, am, ma, ia, ai in both rest and free stroke, and pi, pm, pa for free stroke. Push your tempo only after you are secure and solid.

Exercise 3a

Exercise 3b

And now we’ll take the idea into sixteenths. Speed is not the goal. Instead focus on groove and the subtlety of crossing at different moments in the beat.

Exercise 4

Exercise 4a

Exercise 4b

Exercise 4c

Hope this helps.

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Leo Garcia plays Etude Nº1 by Heitor Villa-Lobos

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Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Twelve Etudes form part of the foundational pillars of modern guitar technique. Etude Nº1 in E Minor begins the cycle by setting an impressionistic harmonic stage for the evolution of the remaining eleven.

This particular etude has right-hand fingerings suggested by Segovia which over the years I’ve used but I like experimenting and have recently found that I like a different pattern. Each pattern yields a slightly different feel. Here I am using p m p i p m p i p m p i p i p i but also warm up using many others. I love working on this etude and come back to it often when I have lots of time to practice. Try these patterns to see if any work or to simply improve your command of the instrument.

p i p i

p m p m

p a p a

p m p i p m p i p m p i p i p i – I use this one in the video above.

p m p i p m i a i a i m p i p i – I find this one to help with the transition into each measure. Honestly, I think it is the best one for me but I need to be warmed up for it to feel great.

p m i a p m i a p i p i p i p i – I think this one is nuts but I saw someone do it really well.

p m p m p m p m p i p i p i p i – This one retains the natural right hand finger position in relation to the thumb.

Any others that you all use?

I’ll try to get a video post of chaining to show how you can practice at tempo. It’s a valuable practice technique for a piece like this.

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The Best of YouTube – Grisha Goryachev’s Warm Ups

Published on by Leo GarciaLeave a comment

Though the always amazing Grisha Goryachev primarily plays flamenco guitar, the videos he posts are so beneficial for classical guitarists, too, that they deserve a spotlight on them. I’ve always thought flamenco players in general had more power in their right hands due to the extensive extensor muscle development as a result of contant rasgueados. So after trying these two guitarless warmups that Grisha posted and judging by how tired my extensor muscles felt, I think they will at least help balance out the musculature of my hands and forearms. The other benefit of trying these warmups is to experience the natural movements required of the hand and fingers and the foundation they provide for the fine motor skills of playing. Try them and let me know what you think!

And, if you have not heard Grisha, check out the videos below. : )

Right Hand String Crossing Technique Tip

Published on by Leo GarciaLeave a comment

One aspect of Ángel Romero‘s edition of Joaquín Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez is that every single scale is fingered optimally for string crossing so that m almost always reaches towards a higher string when blazing through the scale passages (i.e. when going from string 2 to 1, it is fingered i m and not m i). And while you could employ slurs or shifts to maintain optimum string-crossing, if those solutions are not musically in the cards there is a finger standing on the sidelines waiting eagerly to help: a. Using a to switch from im alternation to mi alternation without skipping a beat is an important skill to develop for situations where you would want to maintain optimum string-crossing for the right hand. Here are a few exercises using a to develop this technique.

Keep the following points in mind when going through these.

  1. Maintain a steady metric pulse.
  2. Keep your tone consistent.
  3. Practice rest-stroke and free-stroke.

Exercise 1

Using a to switch direction.jpg

Exercise 2 and 3

Using a to switch direction 2.jpg

Exercise 4 and 5

Using a to switch direction 3.jpg

Go a!

Legato and Dissonance

Published on by Leo GarciaLeave a comment

Creating a beautiful melody on the guitar is challenging due to the fact that every note you pluck decays from that moment on. If you play two consecutive melodic notes on one string, the touch requires extreme precision to give the impression of legato. At certain times, it is easier to achieve a sense of legato by using cross string fingerings. But there is a fine timing line between achieving beautiful legato and dissonance with cross strings and it requires the use of controlled damping – sometimes with the left hand and sometimes with the right.

Here is a great example from Leo Brouwer’s beautiful piece Un dia de noviembre. For a benign light passage there is a lot to think about musically.

Dia de Noviembre Ex.1.jpg

Notice that in the example above muting occurs the moment after the new melodic note turns on. This is a great way to exploit the resonance of the guitar. Of course, there are many variations on this, including one where you would turn off the notes simultaneously with the entrance of the new note but this would achieve a less legato line.

Coming soon, I’m going to post a workout based on Leo Brouwer’s Axioms!