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Check out these 'finger busters' from the Mike Marshall Mandolin School (http://bit.ly/mandomike). Click on the link for more free lessons.


Mandolin Master Mike Marshall calls them finger busters in his online mandolin lessons. They're valuable mandolin exercises that build up speed and strength so that when you are playing, you've done the work to keep your playing in the pocket and your head in the song, rather than struggling to keep up.

In this particular mandolin lesson, Mike uses the A note on the E string as a pivot note and playing all the other notes on that string chromatically (single fret movements) going backwards. He then repeats this pattern on the next string.

Make sure your up stroke is sounding nice and clear. As Mike points out, the down strokes are stronger naturally strong and clear. The up strokes can often suffer from some muting, so this is a great speed exercise for building clarity as well. As alway, use a metronome and build up gradually.

Try four up and down strokes per note, or two or one. The beauty of this type of exercise is that you can try different variations to build your flexibility and avoid getting stuck in muscle memory patterns.

Mike teaches this and hundreds of other mandolin lessons online, including:

Moveable Chords
Three Moveable Chords
Cookoo's Nest
Red Haired Boy
Target Notes - Golden Slippers
Target Notes - Liberty
Tremelos
Harmonizing the Melody
Doable Double Stops
The Mandolin's Place in the Band
Playing Fills Behind a Vocalist
Kickoffs
Blues Scale
Sitting on Top of the World - Blues
1-6-2-5 Progression
Red Wing
Much More!

The best thing about Mike's online mandolin lessons is that you can submit videos of your playing and Mike himself goes over your video and responds with videos giving you feedback on YOUR playing.