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 is the exercise that got me into alternate picking. It came from a Paul Gilbert video. I would be doing you an injustice if I didn't include it here (sorry Paul!).

Here we see where on the fretboard we will be playing this exercise. If you have done the Diatonic Scale lesson, then you will notice that the notes are embedded within the Mixolydian mode shape that I showed you.

I prefer to start this one out with a downstroke, as I have shown on the Tab. But do whatever works for you. The toughest part of this exercise is of course the crossing over of the strings. When doing these exercises try to move your wrist and hand as little as possible. Try to develop a light picking technique. You will develop a crisper picking sound that way (i.e. not so much sound from the pick attack). I think you will find this exercise to be a real confident booster. At first it will be tough, but after a while you will be playing it like I do on the fast audio clip. Trust me - you will get there if you practice!

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.

I think a lot of guitar players neglect using their pinky finger. My hope is that you learn to use it just as much as any other finger. If you are not used to playing with all 4 fingers, then your synchronization may be off with this exercise. Just stick with it, and soon you will be using all fingers in perfect harmony (well, I don't know about harmony...).

Here we see the wide range of notes that your four fingers will be playing. This exercise will help with your stretching ability a little also.

You may be wondering why I start this one out with an upstroke. Well, you just have to go with what works. For some reason starting it off that way just feels more natural to me. But don't let that influence you. Try both ways.

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!

This is one of my favorites. It goes hand in hand with the triplet scale pattern in the Diatonic Scale Patterns and Sequences lesson. It lends itself to a nice rhythmic feel.

This exercise uses the same fretboard diagram as exercise 2.

Really emphasize the triplet feel when playing this one -it helps build speed and momentum.

A lot of lessons on alternate picking focus on achieving maximum possible picking speed. Lessons of this sort take advantage of picking patterns that lend themselves to ludicrous speed. While starting out with such lessons will certainly help you generate picking speed I believe there needs to be a progression to more intricate picking patterns which focus on speed as well as coordination. Think of it as grad school alternate picking (my lessons on alternate picking arpeggios certainly fall into that category!).

One of the greatest challenges when alternate picking arises when you are encountered with notes constantly changing strings. It is well worth your effort to practice exercises that reinforce the act of rapidly shifting back and forth between strings. So in this lesson, we will go over a simple picking exercise to that end.

Basically, we take a scale and sequence it using a repeating pattern of 4 notes. Starting on the first note, play first 4 notes of scale, then go to the second note and play next 4 notes starting from that point and so on. This is referred to as a scale sequenced using quadruplets.

Above is the tab for this exercise. You will note a couple things. First, there is a fairly frequent shift back and forth between E and B strings. Second, there is a position shift in order to reach up to the 10th fret and then another position shift to get back down to the 5th fret. Third, I have indicated the exercise to be played using alternate picking.

The key with this exercise is to pick with a consistent speed. Though the consecutive notes on a given string can be played quite rapidly, the string changes become the limiting factor in speed. No sense in playing consecutive notes as a blur and then slowing down for the string shifts. Playing to a metronome will help you keep a consistent speed.

Hope you enjoy!

Later,

Brian Huether