The "Harald Weinkum-Pain-in-the-Ass-Exercise"

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 5^th position (left index finger on 5^th 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 4^th finger move up a string (see following video). Next time, your 4^th 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 4^th finger going to the next lower string each time.

So far it’s pretty simple… but wait, there’s more!! Instead of just moving your 4^th 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, 4^th finger does.

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

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

…. 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:

1234         1243            1324            1342            1423            1432
2134         2143            2314            2341            2413            2431
3124         3142            3214            3241            3412            3421
4123         4132            4213            4231            4312            4321 

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 (4^th finger moving).

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

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: