Scale & Warmup Exercises

Scale & Warmup Exercises by Bert Casey is a free lesson for bluegrass guitar. These exercises are intended to improve your flatpicking skills. We’ll first cover a basic G scale and then work on some alternate picking exercises that will help build up your right hand speed.

Most lead bluegrass guitar playing or flatpicking is based on the G scale. You need to memorize this scale.

gscale

Once you are comfortable with the G Scale, try this 4 note ascending exercise. This is used in parts quite often in flatpicking. Pay particular attention to the right hand pick direction. It is very important to master the down up picking technique.

ascending

After you are comfortable with the 4 note ascending exercise, try the 4 note descending exercise.

descending