3 Simple Exercises To Help Develop Your Right Hand Technique

To get your right hand up to speed I really love this very simple, super simple, most simple thing you could do which is play slow and play each note four times.

I'll demonstrate on a regular scale but you can bring this into any pattern you're working on.

When you play continuous sixteenth notes you're training this alternate picking mechanism and that gets you to the point where your right hand is sort of thinking for itself.

I like to think of the right hand as a motor.

If we want speed and fluidity we want to have finger independence and also right - left independence and coordination.

The right hand is our rhythm hand, so it needs to be in this state of constantly keeping the rhythm, beat by beat by beat.

This is why I like to teach alternate picking.

It's a great training tool because it gets you to start embodying that sort of motor quality of the right hand.

So that's what I would start with, sixteenth notes on a scale. You could do it on a major scale, you could do it on a pattern, you could do it on an arpeggio, or any lick or combination of notes.

It doesn't quite matter what notes you choose, the important thing is keeping time with the right hand.

Another thing that you might find fun is to work on hammer-ons and pull-offs in the scales.

So instead of plucking each note you pluck the first note and then hammer-on the rest of them.

That kind of gives you this funny set of accents, emphasizing certain notes.

That's a really fun thing to do because you're learning how to keep rhythm with the left hand and you're also developing coordination with the right hand by having to remember which note to pluck.

Another great practice is to come up with études where you're doing an arpeggiated pattern on chords and that can really help develop the right hand.

Let’s take a C chord, for example.

You can make these patterns up, the important thing is to stay consistent with the picking pattern through-out the progression.

Let's make up a pattern that goes like this:

down - down - up | down - down - down - up

Start by practicing that on a C chord, then take that same picking pattern through a chord progression.

We might take C and then go to G, then maybe to D over F sharp, a 1 - 4 - 5 progression.

That's one example of a picking pattern and progression that you could use to develop more right-hand coordination but remember, you can make up your own.

Take an open any open string chord or bar chord or triad that you're practicing and come up with a pattern.

Start with sixteenth notes or eighth notes, something very consistent and then see if you can stay consistent through the different chord voicings in that pattern.

And of course all of this should be practiced with a metronome to develop your rhythm in the right hand.