Well, if you don't mind doing the occaisonal mindless excersice, here's some of the things I do. First, you know the good old 1234 chromatic fingering excersise, well first I do that, across the strings, up to the twelth fret and back down. But that's pretty easy to get at a good speed, so I wrote down on a piece of paper every possible finger combination of 1234(which should be 23, however if there's more let me know). After, you need a target speed, something which you can achieve to actually see results, otherwise, well, it gets frustrating, and that's what leads to people stoping from playing. Anyways, I find a good target speed is the fastest I can I can fumble may way through the 1234 excercise. My goal then is to be able to play that fast, but cleanly, in all the fingering combinations. Doing that gets you hand into playing in what will sometimes be a really weird order of fingering that you normally wouldn't do, and that's the biggest plus, as you soon find almost any fingering excersice to be a lot easier. I also like to play scales in cycles of threes and foruths, usually trying to connect patterns so I getused to switching positions easier.
Now, I am by no means a shredder, but I started doing this a little while ago, and quickly noticed my technique getting a lot better. It really showed me where the holes are in my playing, as I could easily burn through a 1234 excersice, but soon found that I completely sucked when it came to something like 4132 or 1342 or something wierd like that. Another thing I try and do is once I reach my target speed with a few patterns, I try to not increase the speed of the metronome until I cab get all the fingerings that fast, otherwise I'll just focus on those things which I can play good and fast, and forget about the rest, which isn't going to help at all.
One last thing, when doing excercises like that, don't do them for too long. Pick something like 3 or 4 patterns and do that for warmup or something, a good lenghthed warmup, or if you have a lot of spare time one day, maybe do them for 15 minutes or half an hour. Either way, don't dwell on them too long, or else your practice sessions aren't going to sound like music anymore. I recently read an article in a guitar magazine I had tucked away somewhere, and found I great quote "when you practice, think if what your playing is something other people would like to hear". In other words, do something musical a lot.
nder: - don't tell the guys at shredaholic.com)
