I had a guitar student who had been playing guitar for several years but did not know about a very important technique called alternate picking. So I opened up his eyes to this great technique and in a matter of weeks he had made more progress with his picking ability than he had in all his previous years of playing! The idea is that to help improve speed and efficiency, we alternate between up strokes and down strokes, instead of using consecutive downstrokes.

The exercises in this lesson will ensure that you develop impressive alternate picking technique. After a few months of practicing these, you will feel as if your right hand is possessed! But be sure to practice these exercises slowly. You do not want to play these fast and sloppy. Only play them as fast as you can while maintaining clean, accurate technique. Use a metronome as often as possible, and play them with and without distortion. And if you have an acoustic, be sure to practice on that as well. Playing picking exercises on an acoustic forces you to become a cleaner player.

This exercise extends the idea of the first exercise and adds a couple more notes. By adding these notes, you will start increasing your speed when playing the 3-notes-per-string scales.

Here we see the fretboard layout of the exercise.

I don't want to be too redundant with these exercises. Let me just say once again, to play this one slow and clean. Only increase your speed if you can maintain the clean execution.