These are a couple of exercises that I came up with to work on fret hand coordination and finger independence. I got the term “Spider Chord” from Dave Mustaine. He has some exercises similar to this that he does, and utilizes these ideas to great effect in a lot of the Megadeth stuff, most notably the song “Wake Up Dead” (about a minute and a half in). Aside from being a great song, it’s a tour de force of metal rhythm techniques. Learning that will definitely give you an intense workout.
Anyways, spider changes… you’ll notice pretty quickly that your hand starts to resemble a spider when you do this, hence the name. First off is the more Mustaine-like exercise:
When you do this, it’s important that your fingers remain on the same frets throughout. That is: your index finger always plays the fifth fret notes, your middle finger always plays the sixth, your ring finger always plays the seventh, and your little finger always plays the eighth.
It’s pretty apparent that this wasn’t designed to be musical, but technical. However being able to do this cleanly will open up new possibilities for passages that you may not have thought of before. Mustaine says that he developed this technique when he was in Metallica, and he noticed a lot of songs had power chords on one string followed by a power chord one fret up and one string down (this exact thing). He says that Hetfield would change positions to play the new chord, but Dave didn’t like how this sounded (it’s a little slurred and not quite as crisp), so he started doing it this way. If you listen to the Megadeth stuff, you can tell that he pretty much ALWAYS does it this way now. Both ways are perfectly valid, they just sound different. Use the one that you feel suits the passage better. Mix it up and your playing will have lots more character and variety.
The next exercise is something that I got from the my old teacher Andrés Saborio (a fine classical guitarist and top-notch musician, you can check out his myspace page here). It’s a simple ascending chromatic scale, but the challenge is that you’re always playing octaves and never change position. There’s not much to say about this one, watch the video above to see how it works, then try it yourself by downloading the tab here.