Warm-up exercises

It could not be a better starting. Some people may think that these exercises aren't really useful. Of course you can play guitar without these little movements but I think everyone has experienced that when you sit down to play some hard stuff, and you need some time to get familiar with the fretboard before you can play your licks more accurate. These little exercises help us to warm up, and they also can improve our play - speed, accuracy, pure tone.

A little information about the tabs below: my eighth string is dropped to E (so it's EBEADGBE). If you play on a seven or six string you can nail it easily in standard tuning. Anyway these are warm-up exercises so the tuning isn't really important now.

Let's start with the beloved Chromatic Scale. I think this practice will be familiar to everyone. A simple run up and down on the neck.

The next one is based on the first exercise, but now with some string skipping. These kind of exercises really important when you recently bought a guitar, or a guitar with more strings than you had before. And of course you can play extraordinary things. Don't be frightened if you have to skip some strings, think about the possibilities.

This is the standard four finger run, but a little bit different. I mean reversed. Well, you will see. 

I saw this exercise at sevenstring.org - and I really like it. It's just an example, you can play it anywhere arround the neck.

Now we need to reach greater distances. You can play it from the first fret untill you are out of space. 

This is the last one for now. A nice pair which changes the usual order of the fingers.

Well this is the end of the first 'lesson'. If you do this every day before you play harder stuff, I think you'll be ready after these to nail it. And always practice with a metronome. First figure out a normal tempo, and gradually raise it. If you are persistent a few weeks can grant nice speed improvements. But don't try to overrun yourself. Remember: gradually.