I love playing on light strings. The lighter the better. But it means that, by default, my fingers aren't particularly strong and get lazy QUICKLY.
To fix this, I pick up my trusty Yamaha acoustic (my 1st guitar ever) which has ludicrously high action and I start *trying* to play all over the fretboard. It's fun because it's musical and it's effective coz it's a bitch bending on an acoustic, especially one with high action.
I also play lots of chords (coz my lead doesn't sound great on an acoustic ?) which also very quickly strengthens my fingers again.
A lovely exercise I enjoy a lot is to harmonise the C-Major scale. So I play C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim, C. I play about four bars of each. That very quickly gets my fingers strong(er) and it's still musical thanks to the rhythmic strumming and the chords themselves. I haven't done this in a while so please excuse me if those chords are wrong - I'm not yet where I want to be in terms of theory.
After this, I play on my electric for a while to get out of the habit of pressing so darned hard and, voila, I find bends, chords, etc 100x easier to do ?
This is also great for those of us who haven't been playing much lately - it gets back into it a bit faster than practising for longer on the electric.
Enjoy!
To fix this, I pick up my trusty Yamaha acoustic (my 1st guitar ever) which has ludicrously high action and I start *trying* to play all over the fretboard. It's fun because it's musical and it's effective coz it's a bitch bending on an acoustic, especially one with high action.
I also play lots of chords (coz my lead doesn't sound great on an acoustic ?) which also very quickly strengthens my fingers again.
A lovely exercise I enjoy a lot is to harmonise the C-Major scale. So I play C, Dm, Em, F, G, Am, Bdim, C. I play about four bars of each. That very quickly gets my fingers strong(er) and it's still musical thanks to the rhythmic strumming and the chords themselves. I haven't done this in a while so please excuse me if those chords are wrong - I'm not yet where I want to be in terms of theory.
After this, I play on my electric for a while to get out of the habit of pressing so darned hard and, voila, I find bends, chords, etc 100x easier to do ?
This is also great for those of us who haven't been playing much lately - it gets back into it a bit faster than practising for longer on the electric.
Enjoy!