Learning to play the guitar involves mostly you trying to train your ears, fingers, and hands to do things which they weren’t ready for, were too unaccustomed to do, or involve developing muscles and coordination in strange new ways. This is the case for all musical instruments. One of the tricks is to start to look at playing the guitar from this perspective as soon as you can.
One of the obvious cases involves working on a couple very simple coordination exercises. The primary exercise is to use all four fingers on the fretboard (one for each fret) and to simple pick one note at a time, fingering in series, the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th frets on any string. That’s right, just going up 1-2-3-4. The trick is to work to get this to sound as clear as possible, and to get this action where it takes the least amount of movement from all of your fingers (and pick hand). The next step would be to reverse the order (i.e. 4-3-2-1).
Ultimately you could work on going 1-2-3-4 and then move over one string and to continue 1-2-3-4 all the way across the fret board, and then to reverse and go back the same way. This sounds like it is almost too easy…but there are depths to this.
In the first case, you need to do this as smoothly and evenly as possible. Every note should sound like all of the others (i.e. just as clear, and with the same attack to the note). Secondly, speed is not as important as playing smoothly and evenly. Over time you will see that your playing will start to smooth out, and that this exercise will become easier, to the degree that you will be able to play it just as well with increased pace.
There are plenty of variations to this exercise (and they are all worth trying), such as: instead of 1-2-3-4, create permutations, 1-3-2-4, 1-4-2-3, etc. You could work across the neck but moving up (or down) one or more frets are you progress. The whole point is to train your fingers to ‘naturally’ find their way…in essence poise.
The reasoning for this is based upon the idea of what is called muscle memory. Many of the physical actions taken as a guitarist are not supposed to be conscious. As an example, you probably don’t think about what your knees are doing when you walk down the street…it is below you r level of consciousness…nonetheless you are still quite able to walk…
With a guitar, there are so many little details to have to worry about; the idea of offloading many of them makes some sense. The net result is about the same thing as ‘training’ your tongue to speak…later on you won’t even think about it, and you also get better and better at it.
As a means to justify this idea, I have a link to a video (a 1 hour video) of Steve Vai giving some of his thoughts and providing a few examples about how to progress praying the guitar. I am not a crazed follower of his playing, but he is certainly technically a great player. He also has a history of having spent more than a few years doing 12 hour practice sessions (every day!). So check out this video, and carefully watch his hands, he has done a lot more than 1-2-3-4.
Steve Vai Live Guitar Lesson
http://www.livestream.com/berkleemusic/video?clipId=pla_d6fcf89c-751b-440d-a0ba-a750c50ebaa3&time=9
