Beginning Improvisation 1 - Warm Up

Warm up is such an important to get your hands and mind ready for practice or performance. Here is a simple exercise I came up with to shorten my warm up time but reap the benefits of warm up: strengthening fingers, stretching fingers, becoming comfortable all over the fretboard.

Stacked Arpeggios

 

Today's lesson deals with stacked arpeggios. These arpeggios are vertical structures on the fretboard that fit very well with the traditional scale shapes and can be used to reinforce their memorization. 

To get some extra mileage from this exercise, I have created a rhythmically displaced version using the concept of an eight note rest on the fourth position in every bar. Besides enabling us to hear and control the production of sequences of seven notes, this exercise also has the quality to create nice and unexpected melodic lines.