Hey all, keeping this week’s lesson short due to prepping for an upcoming show!

It’s a quick, simple, (but effective) exercise on pinky control! Scroll to the bottom if you want to get right to it.

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The Problem

If you find that your picking speed is slow and have a hard time increasing speed, chances are it’s your pinky. But just to make sure, let’s diagnose the problem.

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Do you have the following symptoms?

• Can play quickly in very short bursts but fall apart during longer segments?

• Can play quickly on one string, but mess up when switching strings?

• Can play faster ascending but slower descending.

• Chest pain, shortness of breath (jk)

If so, chances are your pinky needs some help.

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Why Does My Pinky Slow Me Down?

You’re only as fast as your slowest finger.

You’re only as fast as your slowest finger.

I’ll repeat again for good measure.

You’re only as fast as your slowest finger.

The reality is that your pinky is and always will be the slowest and hardest to control digit in your hand when it comes to playing guitar. Here’s a quick experiment to prove it:

Hold your hand with so you can see your palm. Now touch your index finger to your palm as fast as you can. Do the same with the middle, ring, and pinky fingers separately. Chances are your pinky was slower and didn’t have the same “snap” compared to the other ones. Let’s say your pinky moves at 90% the speed of your next fastest finger.

In addition, your pinky also tends to travel the furthest from the fretboard.

Try holding your hand on your fretboard. Play a couple chromatic runs and then stop as soon as you have to lift your pinky. Even to trained guitarists, it’s common for the pinky to be 5x further from the fretboard as the index finger is.

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Distance, Velocity, and Time (BPM)

Yep, high school physics! The only difference is if we make it musical, we can swap the measurement of time from seconds and minutes to BPMs.

BPM = Distance/Velocity

Let’s math if your pinky has to travel 5x the distance of your index finger and moves at 90% the speed.

5/.9 = 5.56x as long to play a note versus your index finger.

Granted, there are a lot of limiting factors that would prevent a guitarist playing 120BPM to suddenly fly to 667BPM.

However, even if these limited factors capped you at playing a blistering 200BPM, there is still a lot of work to be covered for your pinky to get to that speed!

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The Exercise

This is a modification of the standard 1-2-3-4 chromatic runs.

Here’s the difference:

1. Keep your hand as relaxed as possible. We do this so our pinky can learn to be independent instead of relying on us gripping the fretboard.

2. Play excruciatingly slow.

3. When you lift your fingers off the fretboard (especially when descending), make sure your pinky is the lowest digit, followed by the ring, middle, and index respectively. Even if your index has to fly off the fretboard, the objective is to retrain the relationship your fingers have with each other. Over time, seek to narrow this gap in distance and the minimum distance your fingers come off the fretboard.

4. Snap-on and snap-off. This is where the real difficulty comes in. Quickly and precisely, with the exact same timing as your picking motion press down/release the strings with your fingers. This requires speed, strength, and restraint. Releasing your pinky quickly and suddenly will make it very easy to fly off the fretboard. If you can keep it 1cm away, that’s a challenge in of itself.

The benefits of this exercise are threefold.

First, you train relaxation which directly correlates to over speed. Move a tense finger versus a relaxed on and the relaxed on wins every time.

Second, you train pinky independence. Strength and speed from your pinky is often tied to your ring finger. Separating these two fingers means the pinky can say lower to the fretboard, which means it doesn’t have to cover as much distance, which means it can play more notes in less time.

Third, you train pinky strength. Snapping on and off is an explosive act. If you can do this while staying relaxed you will have a ton of strength and never get fatigued. Again, this ties right into speed.

I made a short video of this. Feel free to reach out and I can send it to you. (I don’t want to post it here and be that guy.

Hope this helped! Until next time, keep rockin’ socks!