John's Guitar Blog

Just about every summer night in Austin, Texas, where I grew up, my friend Ian Moore (a well-known guitarist who some will know) and I would go to Antone’s blues club to watch the legendary blues guitarists play. Jimmy Vaughan, Albert Collins, Buddy Guy, Johnny Winter, and Derek O’Brien were regulars there. And if I wasn’t at Antone’s I was listening to the blues shows on KUT 90.5 (which is one of the things I miss most about Austin, right after Tamale House’s chalupas!). And if there’s one thing to know about playing blues guitar, it’s that the pinky on the left hand serves absolutely no purpose at all. Any highfalutin lick that requires a pinky just sounds out of place.

So it’s no wonder that I’m cursed to this day with a weak left-hand pinky. I eventually branched out beyond Texas blues and became interested in jazz, classical, and Brazilian music. To play the licks of Wes Montgomery, Joe Pass, and their ilk without all four fingers being in good shape is nearly impossible. In the 20 years that I’ve been cursing my damn pinky, it’s learned to behave a lot better but recently I decided to focus on this weak link and see if I could devise some exercises to strengthen the pinky.

And actually before I get into the exercises, there’s the matter of position. As I mentioned, I come from a blues heritage and in blues the thumb rests on the top of the guitar to provide maximum leverage for all those string pulls. However in this position the hand is always at an angle and the pinky is farther away from the neck than the rest of the fingers, so it’s at an extreme disadvantage. If you’re playing the type of music that requires a lot of pinky work, you’ll probably want to bring the thumb down so it’s pretty much right in the vertical center of the neck and all four fingers are equidistant from the neck. I’ve only ever seen one guitarist that can play effortless chromatic pinky runs in the blues position, and that’s Mitch Watkins. But he’s a god and I’m a mortal so I have to do it like mortals do. Also, I’ve found that while practicing, resting the guitar on my left knee instead of the right provides for more accuracy and speed.

OK now for some exercises.

For starters, there’s the good ol’ C scale

You start in position II (2 frets up from the nut) and play the C scale, shifting in the middle. I’ve been warming up with this for years and years, and I don’t think it’s doing all that much good. I modified it so that it has more chromatic notes (from E to G) and added an extra workout at the top where the ring and pinky fingers have to play after one another, since that seems to be the hardest thing to do:

C scale + Chromatics

I worked this into my practice regimen and thought I might be improving my pinky strength, but I realized that this was only happening by virtue of the modification I added. And if playing the chromatics was all that was happening, why not ditch the easy part and just play this:

Mosquito

(I call it “Mosquito” because it’s so annoying for everyone around me.)

It’s just a simple pattern starting with the pinky and going down to the index finger, then back up, on each string. About 10 minutes of this, and I would feel a nice burn in my “pinky muscle” (that muscle on the inside of your hand, below the pinky).

After doing this for a week or so, I became more accurate but noticed that the hardest part was when I shifted strings. When the ring finger plays a note on the 1st string and the pinky has to play on the 2nd string, it’s extra awkward and take a little more muscle. And so my next modification:

Mosquito w/ Skip

It’s the same pattern, but I skip a string each time. Hey, that’s pretty hard.

But wait, if playing the ring against the pinky and shifting strings is key to strengthening the pinky, then why not ditch the rest of it. Along those lines I came up with this:

Pinky Rolls

Holy cow, this is torture. Not only do you have to skip strings, but after the skip the pinky has to roll back up to the next string, and that’s a killer. At first, the notes I played were completely sloppy and my pinky muscle burned out after only one trip up and down the strings. That’s a good thing! I think I found the perfect pinky exercise. The pattern is still pretty simple and in guitar tab it looks like:

After a few weeks of this, I can play it much faster although still a bit sloppy:

Pinky Rolls

But more importantly, it takes a long time before my pinky muscle gets tired. And when I’m playing lead, I’m definitely finding myself able to pull off more difficult licks thanks to my new and improved pinky.