can someone please help me?

[thenewmando]

I've been playing the mando for a couple of months now and my left hand finger speed hasn't improved a bit.
Can anyone tell me any finger exercises to get my finger speed up

[evanreilly]

Play scales with the metronome. Work on good even tone and timing.

[ShaneJ]

arpeggio exercises are good too. There are some good ones along with scales in the "Exercises" folder at mandozine.com. You need TablEdit or the free TefViewer version to view them and play/print them. It's worth your time and effort to get that.

[tnpathfinder]

Consistant daily practice is the thing that helps me increase speed most. If I layout a few days my work goes out the window. An old timer said to me once "Just keep poundin' on that thing and eventually it will talk"
I'm still waitnig!

[pdlstl]

Once I learned the inportance of proper pick direction, I immediately realized that in wasn't my left hand that was holding back my speed. It was my right hand and improper pick direction. Correcting this caused my speed to improve tenfold.

Excerpt from the Mandolin Cafe download page entitled "Pick Direction".

"Pick direction can be one of the single greatest problems that gets in the way of good single-line or lead playing. I'm talking about what I consider to the single greatest problem that gets in the way of good single-line or lead playing. I'm talking about a logical approach to playing lead lines that consists of a very simple set of rules that surround when you use downstrokes and when you use upstrokes.

Most players in the learning stage never gave this a second thought--me included way back when. It was only after giving lessons for a few years that I began to notice that those who experienced the greatest problems playing simple melodies almost always had a flawed approach in their proper pick direction. If this is still confusing, pick direction means the "up" and "down" motion of the pick when playing successive eight notes--like in a fiddle tune for example.

I recommend reading the entire article as well as any other information you can find regarding pick direction.

Click here (http://www.mandolincafe.com/download.html)

My 2¢...