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.

In exercise 3 we had you using all 4 fingers on one string. Now we extend that idea so that you are using all four fingers on two strings. This exercise is the most difficult of the alternate picking exercises in my opinion. It requires several skills. It requires you to do some rapid position shifting and it requires great coordination amongst all the fretboard fingers so that your fingers are playing the right notes. Hang in there with this one!

Hopefully you aren't scared off by this diagram. These are the notes that your fingers are going to be reaching for (with no slides!).

There are so many things to pay attention to with this exercise. On the one hand there is the picking technique. On the other hand there is the finger stretching and coordination. Maybe you will find it a breeze, but if you saw my small hands, you would understand why it took a while for me to nail down this one!