Two Useful Exercises for Guitarists

I had the opportunity to participate in two master-classes with Pepe Romero in my younger years. One was a brief one in Canada and the other a month-long session in Salzburg at the Mozarteum. What set Pepe's approach apart from other classes was the focus on technique. Each class began by playing some basic technical exercises together and the result was that by the end of the class everyone had acquired more technical confidence. This was valuable because most guitarists are still a bit weak, technically, compared to violinists and pianists.

I picked up these two exercises from the master-class and I still use them as a warm-up to this day. The first one is a scale exercise. Most guitarists use the Segovia scales which are certainly useful, but this approach is a bit different. Instead of diatonic major or minor scales, the exercise uses chromatic scales. Very simply it goes from the lowest to the highest note so it also keeps your extension to the highest frets in shape. I'm not going to write out the whole gamut as it is obvious how it is to be fingered. Once you get to the first string, just keep the pattern, shifting up. Once your first finger shifts to the fingerboard past the body, the problem is where do you put your thumb. You have to practice very slowly sliding your thumb from behind the neck to resting along the edge of the fingerboard. With practice this will become quite easy. The right hand fingering is simply to work all the possibilities. These days I am using pm, im, ia and ma.

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The other exercise is for the right hand. This is a rasgueado exercise which classical guitarists normally don't do but it is perfect for both warming up and strengthening the weak side of the hand. On the open strings use this pattern: c ("chico" standing for the little finger), a, m, i (all downstrokes) and i coming back as an upstroke. The trick is to stack the fingers so, for example, the c is stacked behind the a, the a behind the m, the m behind the i and the i held with the thumb. This is so you can put pressure on each finger in turn, releasing it with a sudden burst of energy. As the greatest accent is on the c, this allows you to strengthen the weak side of the hand. You can rest the thumb on the sixth string for stability. Try to make the five-stroke pattern as even as possible.

And for listening, a little piece by Turina, the Fantasia Sevillana which uses a lot of rasgueado: