I won’t deny it, I stole this from a Joe Satriani video. It’s a tough video to find though, and it’s a great exercise, so I feel obligated to pass it along. I do this practically every day, especially before shows or any extended practice session. Apparently Satch does it every day too, so that’s enough reason for me to do the same. It does a great job of loosening up the muscles in your hand and getting you ready to play.
The whole thing is basically these two shapes:
Play those two shapes as written, it doesn’t matter what fret, but preferably a low one because you need somewhere to go. Next, move them up one string. Don’t worry about maintaining the intervals, just keep the shape. Now move up another string and do it again. Now you should be on the four top strings, so your next step is to move up a fret and do the shapes again. Now move down a string, do it again, down another string, do it again, up a fret, do it again…. you get the point.
It’s most helpful if you do this to a metronome, especially when you really start building up speed. But the important thing to pay attention to throughout is that every note is clear and you have no extraneous noises.
This next part is a simple little alteration to the last idea. This time, instead of moving that shape around, we’re going to use diminished 7th chords. I do this with drop 2 voicings, but you can do it with any type of chord that covers four adjacent strings. Here are the shapes I use:
Notice that they’re moving up in string sets just like we did in the last exercise. Do the same pattern of moving across the strings and up one fret as before. This one is a bit more challenging, but more applicable in real music situations. For example, if you had an A7 chord, you could do these three shapes on the 6th fret low E string (Bb), then the 7th fret A string (E), then the 8th fret D string (Bb again) and get a really cool b9 thing going during that chord.
Check out the video for some other ideas on how to alter this exercise to keep it fresh and challenging.