Finger Gymnastics - A Review

The book “Finger Gymnastics” is written by my good friend Charles Chapman of the Berklee College of Music in the USA, and as the title suggests, it will get your fingers doing things you never thought possible.

In my book The Secrets of Successful Practising for Guitarists I mentioned of the need to warm up before doing anything fast or before long sessions of practise. Well this book is a great warm up tool for achieving that. It not only serves as a warm up book, but also helps you to read real music notation all over the guitar neck as well. You basically get two books for the price of one. If you can’t read music don’t worry it has tab to. In the book Charles takes you through various flexibility and strength exercises as well.

Charles says in the introduction that nearly all guitarists will suffer an injury sometime in their career, and also says that most of them are avoidable. In the introduction he goes to great lengths telling you how to avoid these types of injuries. This advice is worthy of the book price alone.

The book begins with some basic warm ups away from the guitar. And then follows with some exercises that you can play along with on the CD. This is great stuff. Charles plays the exercise on the CD at three speeds, slow, medium, and fast, so you can play along. If you are new to this you might have to practise it first without the CD to a slower metronome beat.

Position switching is something that many find hard, and Charles has some great exercises for that as well. After you have mastered that lesson you will have no trouble moving along the fretboard changing positions quickly.

The next section takes us to stretching, just like athletes do, but with our fingers. This section will really get your muscles to limber up so you can play all the things your favourite players are doing. Not many people realise that you have just as many muscles in your fingers and hands as what you have in your legs, so you need to look after them.

It is great to see that he has included a section on pick and finger technique together. This is something that is not mentioned in many books. Many call this technique hybrid picking because it is a fairly new one that uses two techniques melted into one. Playing with your pick, middle, ring, and pinky fingers all at the same time.

There are also some chord examples and the deadly Spider Web Stretch to finish which is fun to play. When you can play the “spider web” lesson you know you have made it. These warm ups and stretches are not the only ones around, but Charles has plenty of teaching experience at the highest level to know that these ones work the best, which is why you should listen when a master speaks, or in this case writes.

This is a great book and is worth getting if you want to increase you dexterity. It is part of Mel Bays Value Line set of books.

To see more about this book and other books written by Charles
click here To visit his website click here

If you want to order this book from your local music store, just ask for Mel Bay 98751BCD, Finger Gymnastics by Charles Chapman.

Happy practising,
Kevin Downing.

© Kevin Downing 2002

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Kevin Downing is a professional guitarist, teacher, and author.
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