Hi, Nathan here, and welcome to my tutorial on "How To Strengthen Your Fretting Digits".
Disclaimer: by no means am I an advance guitar player - I have been playing on and off for the past 5 years and am gaining greater experience by the day.
To build up my muscles in my fingers, and as a warm up exercise, I like to play the beginning to the Muse: "Knights Of Cydonia".
This whole excerpt relies on the effect of tremolo, which is created by bending the string at a high frequency.
Go through the tab first to make sure you can it properly, and get familiar with the song here:
As you can see the excerpt relies heavly on just two strings. Instead of using all my fingers to play the tab, I just focus on using one mainly. To achieve this, just slide your finger your currently working on, down the string to hit the necessary notes. The strength needed to bend the strings while hitting the notes builds up the strength in your fingers.
Now my Pinky is one of the strongest fingers of my fretting hand - and the rest of my fingers are benefited with better accuracy and strength when playing licks or solos. Enjoy cracking open nuts with your harda-s pinky!
)
tremol o is focusing on the rate of playing a note, trills is the alternating between two separate notes (on string instruments in a hammeron/pulloff format, in non stringed and fixed stringed (brass, woodwind, piano, harp) as just switching between the two notes very quickly and repeatedly. vibrato is actually bending the pitch of the note, with the you determining the rate and amount of pitch change.
And finger independence! I like to use an exercise where you put all of your fingers on the 5th to the 8th fret on the High E. Then hammer-pull-off the 5th fret on the B string with your first finger, then the 6th fret with your second finger, etcetera. The trick however, is to hold the remaining fingers on the frets of the high E. Great for building Strenght, dexterity and finger independence.
