55 Guitar Exercises for Improving Accuracy

Guitar exercises should benefit you in four ways: Strength, speed, dexterity and accuracy, should all improve as a result of any worthwhile guitar exercise.

However, the one that often seems to get lost in the weeds is accuracy.

Strength and speed are always high priorities, but it's common to see accuracy get left by the wayside or, heaven forbid, ignored entirely. Even in my own playing, I've at times noticed that I'm playing the simplest runs with accuracy-related mistakes. If you really start to pick apart your playing, you'll probably notice that you're missing or "fumbling" a lot of notes as well.

And that's what this entire article is meant to fix.

Because if you could actually be intentional about improving your accuracy on the guitar and the fretboard, wouldn’t you want to do it? Wouldn't you be glad to eliminate those nagging mistakes and missed notes? Every guitar exercise here (and there are a lot) is designed to help you do that.

Where can accuracy improve?

First, we need to think about where accuracy comes into play and is most relevant. Focus on accuracy in the context of the following three areas:

1. Intervals
2. Chord Changes and Arpeggios
3. Scales and Modes

We need to know how to exercise accuracy for all three of these categories, beginning with intervals, since they are the most basic aspects of fretboard movement. Additionally, if your accuracy improves when it comes to intervals, it’ll improve in the other two areas as well.

"But wait…what is an interval?" Not everybody is familiar with the concept, so if you’d like to brush up, here are a few resources that explain them succinctly:

• Guitar World Intervals Article

Even if you don’t totally “get” intervals, you can still begin working through this content. I’ll explain it as we go.

Guitar Exercises, Accuracy and Best Practices

Regardless of the guitar exercises you might employ, there are some universal best practices that should be applied when you’re trying to develop better accuracy. There are primarily four of them:

1. Memorizing the fretboard dots
2. Aiming for the middle of the fret
3. Play annoyingly slow
4. Staying close to the fretboard

Let's look at the implications and practical workings of each one:

1. Memorize the Fretboard Dots

The dots on top of the fretboard can be seen looking straight down at your guitar’s neck. They typically occur on the following frets:

• Third Fret
• Fifth Fret
• Seventh Fret
• Ninth Fret
• 12th Fret

The pattern then repeats above the 12th fret.

For some guitar players, this is already habit. If that describes you, keep doing what you’re doing. Otherwise, start making it a point to keep your fingers as close to the fretboard as possible. Eventually it’ll become second nature. As we cover each exercise, keep all of these best practices in mind and try your best to implement them as we go.

The Most Basic Guitar Finger Exercises: Minor and Major Second Intervals

We can use the minor and major second intervals to develop our first exercises. First, note that these intervals equate to the following:

• Minor Second: Notes Separated by 1 Fret (semitone)
• Major Second: Notes Separated by 2 Frets (whole tone)

It might sound too easy, but starting off with your one and two fret exercises is going to be a tremendous help to your accuracy, especially when you start to develop speed.

Perhaps it’s not “easy” in the strictest sense of the word, but this will get you started skipping strings (brings accuracy more to the forefront) and allows you to develop a little bit of speed.

Let’s do a similar pattern, but this time with all four fingers.

Exercise #2

I would recommend using all four fingers to complete each set of four notes. For example, the first 3, 4, 5 and 6 should be played with your pointer, middle, ring and pinky finger respectively. We’ll add three more exercises that highlight the minor second interval:

Exercise #3

Basically I’m isolating short, chromatic movements to each individual string, which means you can vary it however you’d like. Change strings, frets - it doesn’t matter. Just make sure you spend plenty of time with this type of exercise. I can guarantee that it’ll pay off well.

Major Second Exercises

These exercises incorporate two fret jumps, or more formally, the major second interval. First, something basic:

Exercise #6

This is just so your fingers can get used to the interval and isn’t likely to challenge you significantly. Don’t spend too much time on it. To challenge our accuracy we can incorporate a pattern similar to what we used in the first minor second tab.

Exercise #7

Let’s add another major second to each line:

Exercise #8

Finger selection for each note is important here and, for the first three notes, should go in this order: First - Second - Fourth. So, pointer, middle and pinky finger for the third, fifth and seventh frets. If you aren’t used to this movement, expect it to stretch your fingers a bit. Let’s adjust the shape to incorporate all four fingers.

Exercise #9

I broke up the pattern into three measures so you can see how the notes are grouped. For each group of four notes, you’ll want to use your first, second, third and fourth fingers (in that order) to play each note. With the third note in each block (fifth fret and fifth string) you’ll need to tuck your third finger behind the second note, which is also on the fifth fret.

The next one looks easy, but it’ll feel fairly counter-intuitive.

We can move the pattern up to different frets to make it more challenging:

Exercise #11

For this second tab, the finger order for the first four notes should be first - third - fourth - second. Basically you’ll play the first two notes with your pointer and ring finger and then slide your pinky finger up to the seventh fret, then drop the note down to the fifth fret with your middle finger, or whatever is comfortable at that spot. The pattern can then repeat on up the fretboard.

Major Second Continued: Increasing Distance

If we’re going to improve accuracy, we need to get better at covering longer distances on the fretboard. We’ll still use groups of the major second interval, but we’ll separate them by a larger number of frets and play the interval in both spots.

Here’s a simple, structural example:

Exercise #12

The intervals are separated by at least five semitones.

What you’ll want to do here is try and develop some speed, up to the point where you’re making mistakes. Once you find that spot, dial it back just enough to avoid missed notes and that will be your target pace.

Exercise #13

We’ve utilized the same structure here but added the complexity of another string.

Combining the Major and Minor Second Intervals into One Exercise

Now that we’ve covered both intervals, as well as some fretboard distance, we can start to run exercises that combine all three. The simplest way to start is to base our exercise off the following three-note sequence:

Exercise #14

Given three notes, we now have two intervals:

• Minor Second: Between the second and third fret
• Major Second: Between the third and fifth fret

Now we can use this sequence to construct our exercises. Here’s what I came up with:

Exercise #15

This pattern takes the same sequence of three notes and moves it around to three different strings. Now, instead of jumping from the third to the 10th fret, let’s look at an exercise that let’s us climb there:

Exercise #17

And continuing:

Exercise #18

We’ll now stack the intervals one after another on each string:

Exercise #19

Repetition (unfortunately) is key to making these exercises really work for you, so there will be some boredom involved. At the same time, we’re providing a lot of variety here, so you can switch around to different exercises at your leisure, which would also allow you to challenge the muscles in your fingers.

As far as the minor and major second intervals go, we’ve covered enough that we can move onto a more difficult topic - accuracy in chord changes.

Chord Changes and Arpeggiated Exercises

One of the best ways to exercise your fingers for guitar chords is to break the chord up into an arpeggio and focus on one note at a time. For our first few exercises, that’s exactly what we’ll do. Let’s begin with a basic open C major chord:

Exercise #20

We’ve moved the pattern up one fret so we can incorporate all four fingers into the exercise. Let’s continue by moving the shape up the fretboard:

Exercise #21

Repeat for the D major:

Exercise #22

For A minor:

Exercise #23

For G major:

Exercise #24

For B minor:

Exercise #25

And for F major:

Exercise #26

Once you’ve gotten comfortable with some (or all) of these arpeggios, the next step is to isolate a few common chord progressions to practice in this form. Practicing accuracy should be contextualized as much as possible. Thus, identifying chord progressions that we most often play will provide that context. Let’s start with the most common chord progressions in the key of C:

Exercising the C, F and G Progression

Exercise #27

If you want to make the progressions tougher, move everything up one fret so you can’t rely on open notes, like we did for exercises 20 - 26. We’ll continue with chord progressions in the key of G:

Exercising the G, C and D Progression

Exercise #29

Let’s continue in the key of E:

Exercising the E, A and B Progression

Exercise #31

The last one we’ll do is the key of F:

Exercising the F, B♭ and C Progression

Exercise #33

Focusing on Barre Chord Shapes

The next step in increasing our chord changing accuracy is to exercise barre chord shapes in a similar manner. Once again we’ll go through the following steps:

1. Find a common chord progression
2. Arpeggiate it with power/barre chords
3. Play through the pattern as an accuracy-building guitar exercise

What we’ll do is start with a shape that is a power chord and not strictly a barre chord, with only the root note and fifth interval. Take the G, C and D progression for example: If we know that the root notes for G, C and D occur on the third, eighth and tenth fret respectively, we can set up our power chord exercise this way:

G, C and D Round Two

Exercise #34

This is an easy exercise that shouldn’t take you long to get the hang of. You can even build some speed here if you want to. Now, to make the progression more complex and to challenge our accuracy, we can just start adding notes until we form a full barre chord for each arpeggio.

Exercise #35

We can do the same exercise using the F, B♭ and C barre chords in an arpeggiated pattern. In this case, I’ll tab out only the first and last form of the exercise.

F, B♭ and C Round Two

Exercise #39

Focusing on Triads

The formal definition of a triad is the following:

A chord made up of three notes that are stacked in third intervals.

Thus a triad will have three components:

1. Root Note
2. Third Interval
3. Fifth Interval

If we look at our interval cheat sheet we can establish the following distances for each interval:

• Minor Third Interval (three semitones)
• Major Third Interval (four semitones)
• Diminished Fifth (six semitones)
• Perfect Fifth (seven semitones)
• Augmented Fifth (eight semitones)

Any combination where you have a root note, one of these third intervals and then one of the fifths would be considered a triad. This is what we’ll use to build our exercises. Let’s start with something easy, in the key of C:

Exercise #41

Though it’s short, this run does present a distinctly challenging note at the third fret on the first string. If we stretch the pattern up the fretboard, we can start to challenge our accuracy on both a horizontal and vertical plane.

Exercise #42

I’d recommend using your middle, pointer and pinky finger in that order. If it’s easier to grab the third note with your ring finger, that’s fine too. Perhaps alternating between both would be helpful. We’ll move onto our second triad:

Exercise #43

This minor triadic arpeggio makes for a fantastic exercise, because it feels backwards and challenges your fingers with a position that they’re likely not used to. Ring finger, middle finger and pointer finger in that order. Just like before we can continue the exercise up the neck:

Exercise #44

We can repeat the movement vertically as well:

The intervals get shifted once we hit the second string (open B), but the value we get out of the exercise is still the same.

Exercise #45

Once again we’re backing down the fretboard after beginning the pattern with our ring finger.

Exercise #46

You could easily employ a chromatic advance up the fretboard as well:

Exercise #47

How you arrange the sequence is up to you. Let’s add one in a major key, just for fun:

Exercise #48

Intervals and triads give us contextual ways to improve our finger strength and develope more accuracy on the fretboard. So now that we’ve covered those two categories, we can move onto a more challenging group of exercises based on scales and modes.

Let’s jump in.

Scales and Modes Exercises

The easiest way to get started is to just play an easy scale as an exercise. Because in essence, that’s what they really are - exercises with a little more meaning and music behind them. Begin with a basic C major scale:

Exercise #49 - The C Major Scale

We mentioned that this would focus on scales and modes. How do we get to modes?

Well, a mode is sort of a variation of a given scale, which means a good follow up exercise would be to come up with a tab that takes us from the C major scale to the C Lydian mode. Something like this:

Exercise #50

You’ll note that there’s only one  note difference between the two shapes. The Lydian mode is just a Major scale with the fourth degree raised one half step. Move back and forth between these two shapes, both for the accuracy benefit and so you can start to hear the difference between them.

Let’s try another one. This time we’ll employ the E major Pentatonic scale:

Exercise #51

And once again, the diagram version:

Then the diagram:

From just these few scales we can derive patterns that can be re-purposed as individual exercises that loosely mimic the scale’s shape. Take the Dorian mode, for example. What if we were to create an exercise based on the three-note pattern on the sixth string?

Each sequence of three notes should be handled by the first, third and fourth finger respectively. Let’s flip it around so we’re using the first, second and fourth finger, simply by dropping the note at the ninth fret, to the eighth fret.

EXERCISE #55

Any variance of this exercise can be helpful, and left up to the imagination, there are plenty of other possibilities. Think of them as more repetitive versions of guitar finger exercises 15 thru 19. These patterns continue to build accuracy with familiar intervals and patterns, which will in turn help you when you go back to playing a more musical sequence of notes.

Developing Speed within the Patterns

I’ve always been of the opinion that the real challenge isn’t to simply be able to play fast, but to know the musical patterns and sequences that provide the foundation for technical proficiency. Not only does that encourage speed, but it increases our chances of playing accurately as well. That’s why we’ve focused so extensively on intervals, chords and common scales.

They’re the most basic patterns we can learn on the guitar. If we’re comfortable with them, then speed and accuracy will come with practice and will be easier to turn into something musical and entertaining as opposed to just something technical.

If you develop your speed within the scales and patterns that you already know, the rest will be much easier.

Smooth and Subtle Movement

The other benefit is that as you use exercises like this, your playing will become smoother and more subtle. Increasing your accuracy allows you to do more with less movement, which is beneficial when you’re trying to optimize your playing and take command of the fretboard.

Thus, subtlety and accuracy should be at the top of your priority list. The more you strengthen your fingers with guitar exercises, the easier those things will be.

Concluding and Further Study

Guitar exercises can be somewhat mind-numbing, and I’m not going to tell you there’s a way around that. To be honest, I don’t believe there is. Weight-lifting, drills in sports and most other “practice” elements of getting good at something, are inherently, a bit dull to one degree or another.

But to perform, you’ve got to put in this kind of work.

Especially with the guitar.

Fight the boredom and keep pushing for better accuracy and a stronger overall command of the fretboard.

Your Thoughts

Do you have guitar exercises you’ve used to improve accuracy? We’d love to hear about them. Give us a shout in the comments section below.