A short instructional YouTube video by Lauren Bateman teaching alternate picking and a four-finger 'spider' fretting exercise. The video demonstrates alternating down/up picking on each string, assigns one fret per finger (5th–8th frets, adding the pinky), and gives practice tips (go slow, isolate hands, keep fingers down when possible). The clip closes by suggesting applying these exercises to songs and previews a following lick lesson.
Chapters
Hey, guitar enthusiasts. Lauren Bateman here. Welcome back to my series on picking and finger dexterity. What we're going to do in this video is we're going to do an exercise where we're going to use all four of our fingers and we're also going to establish what alternate picking is. So in the last video, we just did all down picks with our picking head. In this video, what we're going to do is called alternate picking. Alternate picking is where we alternate between doing a down pick and an up pick, a single string. So, for example, if I am just playing this top string, I would go.
Down, up, down, up.
And that's where we're going to start with this exercise. So see here, I'm zoomed in on my picking hand here. And all we're going to do is we're going to start on the strings. We're not going to worry about our fretting hand. We're just going to focus on the picking hand here. And we're going to go down, up, down, up on the top string. Then we're going to go to the fifth string. Same thing.
Down, up, down, up.
Then fourth string, down, up, down, up. Third string.
Down, up, down, up.
Next string. Down, up, down, up, Bottom string.
Down, up, down, up.
And then we're just going to come backwards to the second string.
So that's it. That's all our picking hand is doing.
It's just doing down, up, down, up.
Down the strings and up the strings. What we're going to do next is we're going to focus in. I'm going to zoom in on the fretting hand so. So that you can see what we're doing on the fretting side of the guitar. So the same thing as the last video in our series is each finger is going to own its own fret. So again, we're going to start on.
The 5th, 6th, 7th, and this time.
We'Re adding in the pinky on the eighth fret. And each finger is going to own its own fret, the fifth finger or the first finger owns the fifth fret, second finger owns the sixth fret, third finger owns the seventh fret. Pinky owns the eighth fret. And we're going to do that down, up, down, up. Picking with our picking ham. Now let's go through the fretting ham. We're going to start on the top string.
So it's going to be five, six, seven, eight, five, six, seven, eight.
Again.
Five, six, seven, eight. 5, 6, 7, 8.
All the way down.
6, 7, 8. 5, 6, 7,8.
When you get to the bottom, you're just going to come straight back up.
Now, you probably saw in the close up that I'm leaving my fingers down on each fret, which can help with stretching out your hand. If for some reason that's too, too difficult for you, just because you don't have quite the flexibility and dexterity in your hands, it's okay to lift your fingers with each fret. It's okay to lift as you go. But eventually you're going to want to work towards keeping your fingers down so that you can stretch out your hand more again, just like in the last exercise, don't focus on speed. We're working on dexterity here and building up movement in your fretting hand as well as your picking hand. We're trying to get these two coordinated. So go slow, take your time, and a good trick to do is to focus on first, just focus on your fretting hand, and then separately, just focus on your picking hands so you can focus on these things separately and then try and put them together. That usually helps. So while these spider exercises are great ways to develop finger dexterity, and I hope you keep them as part of your guitar practice, what I love to do with students is get them into learning actual songs that apply some of the things we're learning in the exercises. So let's jump into the next video where we're going to learn our first guitar lick using this finger dexterity stuff.
