[Ash69]

Like many here on the forum (it seems) I played guitar in my teens and early twenties and then didn’t do much with the instrument for the next 30 years. The last year and a half I’ve been playing quite a lot. I play fingerstyle with the flesh of my fingers as I have no nails.

Lately I’ve been working on a few Celtic tunes in DADGAD (Tony MacManus, Stephen Wake, Pierre Bensusan). The song I’m currently working on is “Le Voyage Pour L’Irlande” and it has, in addition to a lot of other challenges, a little triplet that I’m just not able to do as fast as it should be. I can “fake it” by doing hammer-on and pull-off’s instead, but not three fingers after each other as it’s supposed to be.

It struck me that I’ve done very little or not dedicated right hand exercises. The left hand has gotten a lot of attention and exercises, like controlled scales without flying fingers, moving between difficult chord shapes, stretching exercises etc and I often sit with a guitar while watching tv just practicing my lefthand without plucking the strings. Having said that, of course I have spent quite a lot of time practicing picking patterns and particularly remember working on Fleetwood Mac’s “Never Going Back Again” which was a bit tricky in terms of thumb/finger independence (steady beat on the thumb and triplets on i, m and a). But I feel that is maybe more an issue of getting my brain to move the correct finger at the right time than the physical limitations in the right hand.

I did a little test today to see how fast I could play a triplet with i, m and a and found I could keep up with 90 bpm (i on the beat) for about 20 seconds before my right arm was all tense. I did a bit of “googling” here on the forum and elsewhere and most of the stuff I came across was related to classical guitar. Nothing wrong with classical guitar, and I’m sure there is much to learn even if you play a steel string, but it got me thinking, what do you (non-classical) guitarist do? Do you have dedicated exercises to practice speed and precision for the right hand, or is it just along for the ride?