Originally, I thought I could keep up with my Exercise of the Week lesson, but I just don't have the time to be doing that on a weekly basis. So here is a toned down version - the Exercise of the Month. You can expect to see quite a wide variety of exercises here that will help you in many areas of your playing.

It seems that when it comes to technique, most people equate speed with difficulty. The faster a piece is, the more difficult. This mindset has spawned a generation of players who feel that their picking hand has to live and breeth speed. All picking motions are optimized to play 16th notes at as fast a tempo as possible (what is it with the 16th note obsession anyway?). Consider sweep picking. In my Triad Arpeggios lesson, I covered this common technique for arpeggio execution. Sweep picking lends itself to speed. No doubt about that. And it also seems to have a misleading reputation as being one of the toughest techniques to develop. I don't find that to be the case. Having familiarized myself with just about every technique imaginable on the guitar, I can say that alternate picking across strings is perhaps situated very near the top of the technical difficulty pyramid. In fact, that is the precise reason why techniques like sweep picking arose - to enable speed while crossing strings. But with this exercise, you will forget about sweep picking, and will play an arpeggio exercise strictly with alternate picking. If you are used to alternate picking linear passages, designed for speed (like I used to be!), then this exercise may knock you on your ass. I just started doing this myself last week, and I have found that it has done wonders for general coordination. My picking hand now seems to move in new ways, unleashing new forms of phrasing, that were previously not part of my playing. With that said, the goal of this exercise really is not about the exercise itself. Does that make sense? I didn't think so. The goal of this exercise is to see how it changes your own playing. Perhaps you will be as pleasantly surprised as I have.

Here we see three familar triad arpeggio shapes - major, diminished, and minor. The entire exercise is based on these shapes. You may recall from my Triad Arpeggio lesson, that for any major key, notes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 correspond to major, minor, minor, major, major, minor, and diminished triads, respectively. So before tackling this exercise, be sure that you are comfortable with these shapes, as you will be weaving in and out of them.

Here wee see the tab and standard notation for this exercise. The exercise involves sequencing through all the traid arpeggios in the key of G Major, using triplet note groupings. Each triad chord is noted. The exercise is to be played strictly with alternate picking. Start slowly and play to a metronome. Don't expect to blaze through this exercise. Really focus on maintaining the triplet feel, by accenting the first note of each triplet.

In addition to being an exercise in alternate picking and coordination, this exercise also reinforces Diatonic Harmony, and like many of my exercises, teaches you to play in key throughout the fretboard. If you are playing this on an electric, then I challenge you to extend the exercise further up the neck. In other words, don't stop at the C major triad - continue with D major, E minor, F# diminished, and G major. That is what I do when I play this on an electric.