The "Harald Weinkum-Pain-in-the-Ass-Exercise"
by Harald Weinkum
hwein.com

WARNING: this one is for people who REALLY want to improve their left hand technique. If you're just browsing around, you might be wasting your time, trying to understand the whole thing...

First, think of your left hand being in 5th position (left index finger on 5th fret) and playing chromatically ascending on your lowest string (the notes will be A-Bb-B-C if you're on your E-string).

Now play the same, but let your 4th finger move up a string (see following video). Next time, your 4th finger moves up yet another string, until it reaches the highest string.

Then you do the mirror-image: chromatically ascending on your highest string, with your 4th finger going to the next lower string each time. Here's what it should look (and sound) like:

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So far it's pretty simple. but wait, there's more!! Instead of just moving your 4th finger, you'll move every possible combination of fingers. And I came up with the following, binary system to organize the order:

0001 means: fingers 1-3 don't change strings, 4th finger does.

0010 means: fingers 1,2 and 4 don't change strings, but the 3rd finger does (see video):

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0011 means: fingers 1 and 2 don't change strings, 3rd and 4th fingers do (see video).

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etc....for example

1011 means: fingers 1,3 and 4 move, only second finger stays on the same string.

Here is the complete recommended order (inspired by binary arithmetics):

0000   0001   0010   0011   0100   0101   0110   0111 (cont. next line)

1000   1001   1010   1011   1100   1101   1110   1111

That's a total of 16 different variations, and it should keep you busy for quite a while. but wait, there's more!!

Instead of always playing your fingers in the order 1/2/3/4, you will do all of the above combinations with all possible sequences of fingers:

First, as we already did, all of the above options in the order of 1/2/3/4.

Then, all of the same, but change the order to 1/2/4/3.

Next order is 1/3/2/4, followed by 1/3/4/2.

Again, brought into a logical system, this will be your left/hand/finger orders, and you will do all of the above variations in every of these orders:

That's 24 different orders - each of them to be done in 16 different finger movements, for a total of 384 individual exercises.

However, it is complete overkill to try to do all of them in one practising session, thus I will pick an "order" of the day, such as 3241 and use that for all the staying/moving variations mentioned earlier. For example, the following video shows the 3241 order with the 0001 movement (4th finger moving).

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The last video shows the same 3241 order with the 1001 movement (1st and 4th finger moving).

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As mentioned earlier, I suggest you pick one order per day (starting at 1234 and working your way through the table) and do that one with all movement variations. For your reference, you can print out the following cheat sheet:

the "Harald Weinkum-pain-in-the-ass left hand drill"

You could then check the ones you did (probably in a horizontal order), or just use it for reference.

Good luck!

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