Guitar Exercises by Skill
14 skills · 90 exercises
Pick a technique and start drilling. Every exercise renders as interactive notation with a built-in player — slow it down, set a BPM goal and push the tempo as you clean it up. Free exercises play right in the browser; premium drills add a deeper study player.
Open & Barre Chords
Open chords are your first real vocabulary — ringing shapes like E, A, D and G at the bottom of the neck — and barre chords turn one finger into a movable capo that unlocks every key. These exercises train clean fretting, fast shape changes and even pressure across all six strings, so every chord rings out without buzz or muted notes.
Open hubPower Chords
The power chord — root and fifth, distortion-ready — is the backbone of rock, punk and metal rhythm guitar. These exercises drill clean jumps between shapes along and across the neck, tight muting of the strings you're not playing, and the stamina to keep a driving eighth-note chug locked to the click.
Open hubStrumming
Strumming is your picking hand keeping time: a relaxed, constant down-up motion with patterns that groove instead of just marking beats. These exercises build a metronome-locked strumming arm — accented backbeats, clean muted chucks, and dynamics — so any chord progression immediately feels like music.
Open hubDownpicking
All-downstroke picking is the sound of tight, aggressive rhythm guitar — the engine behind classic thrash riffing. It's also a pure stamina discipline: these exercises train a compact picking motion, consistent attack and a relaxed wrist and forearm, so your downpicking tempo ceiling climbs without your arm burning out mid-song.
Open hubPalm Muting
Palm muting is the engine room of heavy rhythm guitar: rest the edge of your picking hand on the strings at the bridge to choke the ring into a tight, percussive chug. These exercises build the right-hand control and downpicking stamina that drive metal and hard-rock riffing — start slow, keep the mute even, and let the open accents cut through.
Open hubRiffs
Riffing is where rhythm and lead meet — locked timing, clean position jumps, and tight hand synchronisation. These riff-based exercises train you to lock eighth- and sixteenth-note figures to the click, move between low power shapes and higher voicings without dragging, and keep both hands landing together. Timing is the whole point: nail the feel before you push the tempo.
Open hubRhythm & Timing
Timing is the skill underneath every other skill: locking to the click, subdividing beats with confidence, and keeping your place through rests and syncopation. These exercises isolate the clock itself — quarter, eighth and sixteenth subdivisions, offbeats, ties and rhythmic displacement — so everything else you play lands exactly where it should.
Open hubSingle-Note Picking
Before speed comes contact: fretting one clean note and picking it with a controlled, consistent stroke. These beginner-friendly exercises build your first melodies and the picking-hand fundamentals — string targeting, even attack, minimal motion — that every lead technique on this site stands on.
Open hubAlternate Picking
Alternate picking — strict down-up-down-up motion — is the foundation of fast, clean single-note lead playing. These exercises drill picking-hand and fretting-hand synchronisation across two-string boxes, position shifts, and Hanon-style runs. The goal is effortless economy of motion at speed: start clean and slow, keep every note even, and climb the metronome a few BPM at a time.
Open hubLegato
Legato replaces pick strokes with hammer-ons and pull-offs, trading attack for a smooth, flowing line — the language of players like Satriani and Vai. These exercises build fretting-hand strength and evenness so every hammered and pulled note speaks as clearly as a picked one, from slow controlled trills to rolling three-note-per-string runs.
Open hubBending, Vibrato & Bar
Bending and vibrato are where your voice on the instrument lives: pushing a string exactly to pitch and shaking a note until it sings. These exercises train your ear and fingers together — precise semitone and whole-tone bends, controlled releases, even vibrato width at any speed — plus whammy-bar dips and scoops for extra expression.
Open hubSweep Picking
Sweep picking lets the pick fall through adjacent strings in one fluid raking motion, the signature move behind blazing arpeggio runs. The hard part is the fretting hand: roll one finger so only a single note rings at a time, perfectly synced to the sweep. These exercises build that roll-and-rake coordination from three-string triads upward — practise unplugged first to expose any overlapping notes, then add tempo.
Open hubTapping
Tapping brings the picking hand onto the fretboard, hammering notes to reach wide intervals impossible to fret with one hand — the Eruption trick. These exercises start from the core tap–pull-off–hammer-on loop and grow into multi-string patterns, with the muting habits that keep everything clean under high gain.
Open hubLicks
Licks are technique turned into music: short, reusable phrases in the styles of the players you love. Each exercise here is a little vocabulary lesson — learn the phrase, loop it, push the tempo, then move it to other keys and drop it into your own solos.
Open hub