Insane difficult finger independence exercise!
She does it so flaweless, and also the alternate picking is very good!
Good luck wuth this one!
I tried and tried…but failed…
Fingers are not independent in any sense. They cannot be trained to become independent.
This exercise is being performed well, but there’s essentially zero transfer of training to actual guitar playing. If anything, it requires you to adopt and habituate fretting postures which are suboptimal for real playing, and demands muscular cocontractions which add unnecessary load and stress.
If you aren’t excited to play this for it’s own sake, either because you love how it sounds or because you enjoy it for some other reason, I see no value to practicing this at all.
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I do not agree with you.
To perform this exercise at such a speed so flaweless requires a loooot of focus, practice and patience.; that alone will help you a lot in learning to play the guitar and perform difficult passages in music.
Besides that it is a good excercise for synchronisation and finger strength.
I am doing this one for a few weeks now and already can feel the benefits of it.
Each to his own.
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Fingers are not independent and cannot be trained to become independent. This is an anatomical, physiological and neurological fact.
Any exercise which purports to develop “finger independence” cannot possibly develop such a thing, because such a thing does not and cannot exist.
All coordinations involve a degree of specificity. Any motor pattern/chunk has invariant features. They are
- Action sequence
- Relative timing
- Relative force
The problem with these types of exercises is the first point. The sequences of fretting actions do not transfer to actual playing, because these sequences do not fit over the fretboard figures used in actual playing.
So, the coordinations trained are specific to these exercises only. The coordinations don’t transfer to actual playing because the motor invariants are not compatible.
Moreover, all of these exercises (anything involving all four fingers in awkward sequences) demands strenuous muscular cocontractions.
Everything above is fact, not my opinion.
It is my opinion that practicing exercises such as these is largely worthless, and that time could be better spent practicing coordinations that are naturally and immediately transferrable to musical figures on the fretboard.
You are absolutely entitled to disagree with my opinions. I would ask that you explain your reasons to me, because if there is some value I have not recognised then I will acknowledge it.
I spent many years practicing exercises such as this. I made far more dramatic progress after I stopped practicing all of these exercises and began focusing on developing transferrable coordinations.
I have students come to me who have spent decades practicing them and who can perform them expertly, but who aren’t happy with their fretting hand in actual musical contexts.
Developing focus and patience is important, but these traits can be developed while practicing coordinations that are actually transferrable. Everybody has limited practice time, and unless you enjoy playing these types of exercises for their own sake, I can’t see any value to them.
Children have strong enough fingers to play guitars with efficient fretting mechanics. If an adult man or woman is struggling with “finger strength” while playing guitar, their fretting mechanics are very poor.
Without writing a full article on the topic (a project which is in preparation and which will be much more detailed), synchronisation just doesn’t work how people think it does. You don’t develop it, you already have it. If you didn’t, you couldn’t walk, run or jump.
You ensure the synchronisation of your coordinations by creating compatible motor phase relationships for both hands in your chunks, then your motor system does synchronisation for you.
Absolutely, do whatever makes you happy. If you enjoy these exercises, then more power to you.
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I am aware of all he points you mentioned.
I am a pro player, graduated from the Conservatory (Jazz) and a teacher myself.
I Never did these kind off excercises myself and therefore never thaught such to my students.
But, since i am doing this one for a few weeks now i do find some benefits from it.
I still can’t (and probably never will never be able to do it as flaweless and fast as that Asian girl does), but it helpes me to focus.
Especially the movement between 1st and 3d and 2nd and 4th finger while keeping the other fingers fixed.
You can use this in a musical way for letting a note ring (ok, you therefore don’t need to fix 2 fingers on a string, one will do) while playing other notes arround it.
It for sure is not an excercise that will make you a fare better guitarplayer but i still like it for the reasons i mentioned.
Anton Oparin (monster player) in an interview also talks about doing these kind of exericises.
It still is impressive how flaweless and fast that girl can execute this one. You for sure can impress your fellow guitarplayers with it 
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I’d be interested to hear his reasons.
This is definitely an impressive technical feat. I don’t mean to diminish how well it’s executed in the video at all.
If people enjoy exercises like this for the technical challenge, then have at it. There are a lot of things I used to practice that I now believe to have low transfer to actual playing, or which were difficult just to be difficult.
In many situations I enjoyed it or found the experience cathartic, but in some cases I found it deeply frustrating. Personally, I think learning the guitar can be testing enough without unnecessary excercises that are difficult only for the sake of being difficult.
I’ve had many students who’ve been very focused on practicing difficult “exercises” throughout their journey, some have spent decades in this mindset. Some can perform the exercises expertly, but are unhappy with their picking and fretting mechanics in actual playing. Others have spent so much time struggling and failing that they develop debilitating anxiety around the guitar. They believe themselves to be deficient in some way, that there must be something “wrong” with them. These situations upset me and I see it all too frequently.
Personally, I was probably somewhere in the middle. I was very unhappy with the return on time invested on exercises focused on nonsensical rubbish like “finger independence” and “economy of motion.” I had a deeply set feeling that I had some physical limitations or technical deficiencies because some exercises were intractably difficult. Thankfully, I had been fortunate enought to have achieved a respectable level of skill in actually playing the guitar, despite some inefficient practice habits and problematic attitudes towards the instrument.
I think I’m fairly adept at impressing other guitarists. I have far more trouble impressing everybody else
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Hi Tom, appreciate your reply here.
For many years i’ve practiced the 1-4 permutation exercises in all variations. Far too many great players recommend exercises such as this from Govan to Vai, etc.
Supposedly they form a mental connection with the brain and the fingers, which translates not necessarily to music, but to dexterity when actually playing diatonic patterns, etc.
How can so many great players recommend these types of exercises, and they have zero transferrable
value to the guitar?
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Are you familiar with the idea of a “physical genius?”
Why do you assume that the amount of effort put in to attaining the ability to execute a physical activity has any relationship with that individual’s facility with being able to do so within a given amount of time?
In other words, the amount of practice you put in is independent from the results for people who are able to solve physical movement challenges with greater natural facility than others.
Look into why the standing vertical jump is correlated with visual learning and facility with executing complex movement patterns in sports. I’m not saying Val or Govan have 36 inch plus vertical jumps, but the neurophysiology is the same.
Michael Jordan was a terrible coach, while Phil Jackson was a horrid basketball player. Jordan never had to solve movement problems relating to playing; he could just do them. Jackson probably spent his entire playing career woodshedding; that’s why he was able to think strategically and come up with means of getting things done conceptually and logistically. Many such cases.
Pat Martino was able to completely rebuild his playing and improve on it after completely losing his functional memory after an aneurism, seizure, and major brain surgery. Neuromuscular efficiency is genetic; his brain and body could still solve physical problems at an incredibly fast and efficient rate. The music theory was just a program he ran.
My old guitar teacher, Jason Jenkins, knew a lot of cats in the business through Joe Lalaina, Malmstee, DiMeola. He told me that Paul Gilbert’s technique was fully formed when he went to GIT. The rest was just polishing. His brain could solve physical problems very quickly. Same with Shawn Lane, Jason Becker, etc., etc.
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Not sure I’m saying it’s solely dependent on sheer human effort here, or that the amount of time put in, equals results… you sure you’re responding to the right person here?
Exercises such as the one the OP posted, as well as the “24 permutations” that everyone from Petrucci to Chris Brooks and so on, promote at one point or another, according to them… help to develop “neural pathways” in the brain, in ways others can’t.
they help to develop a relationship between the brain and the hands by getting the player to
intensely focus on unorthodox patterns, etc.
I don’t see the correlation between “freaks of nature” guitarists and athletes and the value or lack of value for finger independence exercises.
I agree that they have a finite degree of return on investment of time musically. They are simply vehicles to help make it easier to for the mind/body to assimilate complex information.
Also, you are kidding yourself if you think these players didn’t put in an ungodly amount of hours, reps into developing virtuosic ability.
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Hi @NCASO .
After these years of practice on these exercises, are you satisfied with the results? Do you feel you have attained the benefits these exercises are supposed to provide while actually playing?
I’m very aware of who I am contradicting when I make these comments, and I don’t do so lightly.
These exercises may help novices who lack any proprioceptive or kinaesthetic awareness of their fingers to develop some degree of dexterity.
However, that awareness can be developed with digital sequences that actually appear in real playing. I would argue that this approach is much more efficient, achieving far greater results in a much shorter time frame.
The diatonic and pentatonic scales (the things we actually play on the guitar) are not arranged on the fretboard in any arrangements that are compatible with the fretting postures or the digital sequences that are required in the permutation exercises.
The fretting postures required for permutation exercises are suboptimal for actual playing and the coordinations do not map onto the fretboard structures used in real playing (for the reasons described in my earlier comments). The unusual digital sequences and combinations force constant cocontractions between opposing extensors and flexors which adds unnecessary stress and fatigue, and which can encourage habituation of excessive background tension.
The permutation exercises ignore the anatomical, physiological and motor learning realities of fretting. They’re lazy. They’re easily generated from a position of ignorance by directly applying simple mathematics to a contexts where it doesn’t apply.
They don’t require any understanding of real playing to create (which is immediately obvious if you spend even 10 minutes analyzing the fretting sequences that appear in real playing).
Worse still, they have no real goal. The notions of “finger independence” and “economy of motion” are total bullshit and I’ve written to great length on this forum to explain why.
They’re easily designed and prescribed by teachers who don’t really understand what they’re doing. They’re difficult, and students believe that if they’re difficult to do they must be worth doing. When the student has difficulty with fretting skill, the teacher goes back to prescribing the permutation exercises and tells the student to focus on finger independence and economy of motion.
I’m sure many great players have practiced the permutation exercises, and they may even feel that it was beneficial to them. However, it’s extremely difficult to infer any significant transfer of training.
Many of these great players are highly intuitive and can solve movement problems rapidly. These people may simply have solved the movement problems of real playing and the movement problems of the permutation exercises separately, in roughly the same time frame. Other players have spent enormous amounts of times practicing. These people may have spent enough time developing the skills of actual playing that their practice volume compensated for some inefficient or detrimental exercises.
I have seen many students who have practiced these exercises for years, or even decades. Some can perform these exercises expertly and but were very unhappy with their fretting hand technique in real playing before coming to me. I’ve also had students who’ve never performed these exercises who have achieved fantastic results through my approach.
If we consider the skill of fretting, we can identify the following essential criteria:
- Efficient muscular activation against low background tension.
- Strong connection to internal clock.
- Postition and string tracking capability.
- Facilitation of some musically applicable fretboard shape/figure/structure.
- Facilitation of monophony or polyphony (contextual)
- Faciliation of some fretting hand articulations (contextual)
We must test that our mechanics actually achieve these criteria. We must practice things which are actually representative of the skills involved in real playing, so what we practice must address these criteria.
My focus in practice and in teaching is in generating vocabulary of transferable rhythmic coordinations (or rudiments) that are chunked in relation to our internal clocks and which respect the constraints mentioned above. This vocabulary acts as a basis for real playing.
I prescribe some basic rudiments that have have broad application to students and set clear practice rules. This helps them to organise into movement solutions, and it teaches the approach. I encourage students to build their own rudiments and explore their own style.
The approach works well, and it works quickly.
Many players have put in an ungodly amount of hours and have not achieved those results, including some members of this forum. For eample, it’s simply not possible that Shawn Lane could have spent more hours practicing by the time he was 16 years old than some members of this forum have accumulated over their lives.
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Shawn is a freak of nature, if there ever was such a player. Even beastly guitar players admit this, he’s really an anomaly here.
Thank you for reply, I appreciate it very. If I came off as a permutation exercise evangelist earlier. .I’m not! Yes I’ve practiced exercises such as these over the years, but in
limited amounts. I would much rather spend my practice time on actual music/diatonic exercise patterns, etc. I was never under the impression that these exercises would give me virtuosic abilities… its more the concept that “foreign” and difficult fingerings engage the brain in an unorthodox way… thus making diatonic passages. “easier”
Again, I didn’t come up with this theory. I’m simply saying that some of the most technically proficient players in modern guitar have promoted the use of these types of exercises, in one form or another in their printed materials and in video.
You say you’re aware that you’re contradicting these great players, when you disagree, and
you do present logical arguments based on fact, especially given your experience as a player and teacher…
I ask why then, have these great players promoted these useless mind-numbing exercises?
Is some plot to have us waste away our time in the wrong direction, so they forever hold their grasp as top players?
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An important thing to understand is that the concept of “Great player X did Y, therefore, if I do Y, I’ll also be great” isn’t valid unless you can demonstrate a causal link between what they were doing and how it affected their playing.
For a non-guitar example: Lyoto Machida did very well in MMA, and there are a bunch of things he did that you could personally try to get better in the context of MMA as well. One of those things is drinking is own urine. Which is stupid. But hey, Lyoto Machida did it, so if you do it, you’ll be like Lyoto Machida, right?
Our understanding of the human body and the neurology behind movement only continues to grow - a lot of these exercises were created when our understanding of that was minimal and we had to do something - they don’t actually solve the problems we encounter in guitar playing, but because we had poorer understanding of the human body and the process of motor learning, we didn’t know that.
George Van Eps, in the world of jazz guitar, had a bunch of wacky fingerings he used in his instructional material, a number of which he admitted weren’t practically useful but were to “exercise the hand”. Funnily enough, most of the people who follow George Van Eps’ instructional material deeply end up just discarding his fingerings and focus on the ones that are actually of use, and they’re still monster players.
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Super interesting discussion here. So the video has the person playing a pretty complicated, finger-twisty thing and doing it well at a pretty fast clip. Awesome!
I have done a finger exercise or two in my life, and I have to say that at this point I agree with Tom! I struggle with ambiguity, and I really need to see a benefit from the hard work otherwise I simply lose interest! I know lots of players that swear by exercises like that, and that’s great for them - I won’t try to change their minds!
Personal opinion; For me to learn a thing like that, and invest energy into it “working” it so to speak, there is definitely a criteria (1 or more) that has to be met… This is just me of course, certainly not forcing my opinion on anyone else, and I most definitely often “abbreviate” sequences into a sort of “chromatic” state to simplify the notation; I can transpose 'em into whatever tonality I want once it’s under my fingers.
- Does it improve some or aspect of my playing that I am struggling with at the moment?
- How does it sound?
- Can the intervallic sequence be applied to a melodic/diatonic scalar type playing, and if so, why wouldn’t I just start there instead of a chromatic/synthetic thing?
- How long is this going to take, and would I just be better off going after some Bach or Coltrane or Paganini or something?
- Does practicing this have a “side effect” where the exercise yields benefits to other unintended aspects of my playing despite the exercise being seemingly unrelated…
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I’m largely in agreement with @ShadowoftheSun here.
As people, we’re really not very good at identifying causation. We naturally mistake coincidence and correlations for causation all the time. What we see is all there is, our anecdotal experiences are powerful and establish biases within us, which are often unconsious and difficult to overcome.
Your mother made you chicken soup when you had a cold. You felt some immediate relief and you felt better the next day. You believe that chicken soups cures colds.
We have to be able to move past “common sense” and “folk wisdom.” In any serious study, we must confront the possibility that what we might assume, what we have been taught and what we think we know might be false, in part or in the whole.
I think most great players who have taught the permutation exercises have done so with good intentions. Students struggle, and they want to help. Their experience of fretting hand development may have been coincident with practicing the typical permutation exercises. If not, they may know that others recommend these exercises. They may simply generate their own in the hope that they’ll be effective.
They’re giving us chicken soup for our colds.
I think this is largely the truth of it. I’d like to give the earlier generations of players and teachers the benefit of the doubt. People did what they could.
A far as modern guitar pedagogy is concerned, I take issue. We should know better. Even without understanding the anatomical, physiological and motor learning principles involved, enough time has passed and enough evidence has accumulated to reject their use.
These exercises at best highly inefficient and at worst actively detrimental for fretting hand development.
And yet, notable online teachers still prescribe them with the nonsense goals of “finger independence” and “economy of motion.”
It’s lazy teaching, rehashing the same rubbish that’s been around for decades. It requires no real understanding of fretting technique to generate or prescribe these exercises. Infact, I’d argue that merely prescribing them is a strong indicator that the teacher doesn’t actually understand what they’re talking about.
Worse still, there are definitely teachers who know that these exercises don’t actually work, and they prescribe them anyway. If you make your living teaching guitar, there’s an expectation from students that you will be able to provide explanations and practice activities that will help them to improve. Guitar students will inevitably ask about fretting hand technique, and the teacher (who may themselves be a good player) doesn’t really understand the mechanics, or the relevant principles of anatomy, physiology or motor learning.
So, they prescribe the classic permutation exercises. The student finds them difficult and concludes they’re worth practicing. If the student’s fretting improves over time, almost surely due to other practice (repertoire, etc), the coincidence is taken as evidence that the teacher was knowledgeable and provides good instruction. If not, the teacher prescribes some other contrived exercise to keep the student on the hook. Of course, the student finds this exercise even more difficult, so they continue.
It’s a deflection from the actual problem, and creates a feeling of inadequacy in the student and a dependence on the teacher. It’s a classic grift.
I can only conclude that a teacher advocating these exercises today is either well-meaning but ill-informed, lazy, or dishonest.
I was very hesitant to begin teaching. I only began doing so after receiving mutliple private requests from some interested (and persistent) people, and I only announced my availability publicly after the feedback they provided was overwhelmingly positive.
I personally experienced very dramatic progress from the approaches I teach. However, my own anecdotal experience is just one observation, and I’d be lying if I said that I wasn’t already an “advanced” player or that I hadn’t followed some elements of standard pedagogy at different points in my development. It was the success of my students that gave me confidence in my understanding and my approach.
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My 2 cents is to first figure out a measure of “getting better”. It’s hard, and subjective. For me, my criteria is:
- Can I play things with greater ease than I could? (fuzzy)
- Can I play at a higher speed than I could? (pretty clear)
- Can I play for a longer duration than I could? (also pretty clear)
Other people may have other ways they measure their own success. When we’re talking about technique though, these bullet points would probably cover a lot of players.
Ever since I found out about CtC and realized technique is more about “how you play something” than “what you’re playing” I decided I’d stop practicing things I’d never use musically. So even if I’m working on an “exercise” it’s gotta be from either a solo I’m working on, or it could be used in a solo I’m working on.
I say all this because I have this deep background in classical music they preach practicing scales and very contrived arpeggios and neither of these happen much in the repertoire. Definitely it has merits for beginners as tone production is a big thing in that realm. But for more experienced players…I don’t get it. Instead of practicing all the Guiliani arpeggios, why not find a musical arpeggio piece and play that instead? Maybe it’s because other instruments with mature pedagogy actually do have a lot of scales and arpeggios in their repertoire. Guitar, classical or otherwise, wanted to fit in? Who knows.
But for the OP topic, yeah…those permutations. I’ve done plenty of that over the last 30+ years. Maybe they helped some with formative things? I just know I’ve made better advancements in recent years and I’ve done zero with those drills. My fretting was helped more by observing various postures Tom lectured on, and playing with all hammers on musical shapes/lines and being picky about evenness of tone and volume.
One last thing I’ll throw out, there’s this classical fretting exercise which we are told “we must do, every single day for x minutes”, where you hold down notes and then move various fingers in opposing directions, across different vertical spans. I did get some benefit from those. It solved my first bullet point of “makes things feel easier”. But that’s very contextual to classical guitar where the challenge isn’t so much speed, but the contorted shapes we make with our hands. And often we hold down a chord and move just a finger or 2 in different places as the melody/harmony change. Not really applicable to the fast electric playing most of us are here for. Even so, rather than devote 20 mins a day to that…why not just figure out where the problems are in the piece I’m playing when it’s a matter of moving fingers in opposing directions? Maybe the problem is really that my fretting posture needs to shift OR maybe I can refinger the section and make it easier?
TL;DR (and I blame no one for NOT reading my posts lol)
Don’t zone out. Solve problems.
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Chicken soup may actually help colds…
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and therein lies the danger of using analogies
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My parents actually gave me hot whiskey, not chicken soup.
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