Interested in gaining more velocity in your fingers when playing the Venezuelan Cuatro?
Practice with this scale for the Venezuelan Cuatro.This exercise will help to facilitate your finger’s movements and will allow you to build confidence & accuracy when marking.
In this lesson we will teach you how to play a chromatic scale from the first A note until the A note one octave below with the first frets of the Cuatro. The chromatic scale is one where all halftones are played which are in between the first and the last note in the scale.
Transcript
“The exercises of scales are very good for reinforcing the fingers of your left hand, especially the last two which are generally weakest. This particular exercise up until and including the second string does not even make use of the primary or the third, it only makes use of the A and D strings. This permits you to mark the strings firmly with the pinkie.
This is a chromatic scale from A until F#. This passes through all of the notes in between: A, A#, B, C, C#, D, D#, E, F & F#.
Every time you conduct this exercise, you will feel a slight amount of pressure in this particular area of your hand (between your ring finger & pinkie). This means that you are gaining a considerable amount of strength within that area and as you practice you will be increasing your precision whilst marking the strings.When you feel that you are confident and are able to conduct the exercise with fluency, simply follow the patter from top to bottom, and you can also switch it around starting from front to back and back to front.
If you try to do it in this way (back to front), then make sure you start of slowly and mark the strings properly. This way you will practice and gain the same amount of strength going both ways.”
At first, be sure to play this exercise slowly and then slowly accelerate until you are able to do this with the speed shown in the video.
