MUST KNOW Technique For FASTER Picking | Alternate Picking Exercise

I'm going to show you a must know picking technique. Especially if you're a guitar player looking to get the speed of your picking up, you're going to want to know how to do this.

First, I'm going to talk about the picking technique and I'm going to show you a little exercise you can use to help develop this technique. And then I'm going to show you how you can practice it to help start boosting your speed. So the first thing I want to talk about, alternate picking. All right? That's the picking technique. The there's a lot of different picking techniques, but most students, when they start playing the guitar, they start by picking all downs. It's down, down, down, down with your picking hand. Okay? So the hand that's holding the pick and that's perfectly fine. You're starting to develop your control and you're doing all downs and that's great. But eventually you're going to hit a plateau in terms of your speed because you're only doing down picks. Now with alternate picking, you are going to alternate between a down pick and an up pick on the.

So you would pick down, up, down, up. That's what alternate picking is. So instead of, you know, you'll reach a limit with just down. But when you do alternate picking.

I can go much faster with alternate picking versus just doing all downs consecutively. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to have you fret the high E string. At the fifth fret. I just want you to practice the motion of going down up. We're just going to go down, up, down, up.

Okay. And you should just sit there on that string to the point where you don't have to focus on the pick and you feel like the pick is like, okay, good, I got this down up thing going really good. Because if you don't have the down up going with your picking hand, there's no sense in getting the fretting hand involved. So focus on one hand at a time. Really focus on getting that alternate picking to a point where like, you don't have to think about it because the more you do this, eventually you're not going to think about it. It's just going to become muscle memory and your hand is just going to automatically do it. So that's pretty cool. So the exercise we're going to do is just a simple spider exercise, but we're going to be not only moving down and up, we're also going to be moving horizontally. So vertically and horizontally. So we're going to start on the fifth fret. And each finger is going to own its own fret. The first finger is going to own the fifth fret. Second finger is going to own the sixth fret. Third finger is going to own the seventh fret. Pinky's going to own the eighth fret. We will be moving these frets and I'll show you in a second. But all I want you to do is start off on the top string. And when you play the fifth fret, it's a down pick. Second finger is an up pick. Third finger is a down pick. Fourth finger is an up pick. So down, up, down, up. Okay. And you can just sit there on that for a minute, going back and forth. Okay. Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. Okay. Just get used to doing that. Okay. And you can just work on speed a little bit there. I'm going to show you what we're going to put this to a metronome soon. I'm going to show you how to practice this so you can work on building speed. But first, don't worry about the speed. Speed will come eventually. Start slow, build muscle memory. First speed will come later. Alright, so what we're going to do with this exercise is we've got 5, 6, 7, 8. We're starting on the top string and then we're going to move down to the A string. Same thing. Down, up, down, up, down again. D string. Down, up, down, up, down to the G string.

B string. Down, up, down, up. And then E string. Down, up, down, up. Now when we get to the E string, we're gonna slide forward with our pinky and we're coming backwards. So this is a great exercise. We're going to do a lot of work with your pinky too. If you feel like you have a weak pinky, this is going to help with that. So when we slide up, we've got the pinky. On the ninth fret, we're going to come backwards. It's going to go nine, eight, seven, six. Okay, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. We're moving all the way up the str. Okay, our first finger is going to end on that sixth fret. You're going to slide that now up to the seventh fret. You're going to do the same thing all over again. Okay, it's up. It's 7, 8, 9, 10. Down, up, down, up. Okay, one more time. Slide that pinky up. Come backwards.

It's all down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up. All right, so if I go through that entire exercise and you can keep going, you can go backwards, forward, forwards, you can do this as many times as you want. I just go down and up a couple times. So if we went through that really quickly, it would sound like this. One, two, ready, and.

Down, up, down, up.

Now, you might be saying, Lauren, why is this useful? Well, eventually when you want to go, you know, you want to get into playing like pentatonic scales.

Do, being able to do alternate picking, you know, for different things is very, very helpful. It's very helpful to be able to move, you know, through your frets, you know, or even, you know, sliding up to different positions and being able to do that alternate picking stuff. That's why it's important. We're just starting to develop your picking skills. All right, so how do we practice this for speed? So when you first start this exercise, you want to go slow and just get the mechanics of it and get the muscle memory. Eventually what you're going to want to do is you're going to want to put it to a metronome. Now, I just have an app on my phone, it's called Metronome Beats. Alright? And right now I've got it set to 100. Okay? And you're gonna hear it clicks. Okay, now all you want to do. And you don't have to start at 100. I'm just starting at 100 for this demonstration. That could be too fast for some of you. You might have to start at 60, you might have to start at 50. But for every click of this metronome, I'm gonna play a note, alright? And I won't play through the whole exercise. I just want to show you guys what we're doing. So if 100 is your starting point, now we want to work at timing. So we got one, two, ready? M.

So it's down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

Okay? And I won't go through the whole exercise. I just want to. I'll go through the down parts just to show you guys what we're doing. So if you're like, okay, 100 is great, I can do that. Now what you want to do is you want to start picking up the speed, so. And keep doing this over and over again. You're like, okay, maybe now I can do it at 150. 1, 2, ready? M.

Can hear it's moving a lot faster.

And the goal is to try and keep the timing fluid with the Metronome, Okay. And try not to be like you start doing this a lot, you're probably going too fast. You want to have clean notes on while playing with this metronome. Now, eventually when you get up to 200, for me, it tends to start being a lot of clicks. It's a lot of clicks I like to do. Once I get to 200, I like to go backwards. I like to go back to 100 and I do eighth notes. Okay? So it'd be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And so I'm going to play two notes for every click. Because 2 times 100 is 200. Right? It's just a way I like to keep it within that 100 to 200 range. So if I were to count this now, it would be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

Now, if you hit a bad note, say you're doing this. Say you're doing this and you're coming down.

And you hit a bad note. Keep going. Try to find yourself within the mistake and try and keep going. A lot of people when they're working on this stuff, they make a mistake and they stop and then they come right back to the beginning. Try to as best you can on this exercise, try to play. If you hit a bad note, just play through the mistake as best as possible, and that's what you're doing. This becomes a game for you. It becomes a scorecard. And your goal is to try and push this speed and get it up as fast as you can. Because the faster you can do this, the easier it's going to be when you want to start getting into scales and playing lead guitar and playing solos and playing really fast passes. The more you work on your picking work, the better. And a little tip for you guys. I just want to let you know, when I do stuff like this, I like to use more of like a Jazz 3 style pick. It has a little bit more of a point to it, which I feel is a little bit better at being super accurate and faster on notes versus the regular rounded pick. So that's a little extra tip for you guys on this video. Now, if you feel like your hands are as slow as molasses, then I would highly recommend checking out my top finger dexterity exercise over there where I'll show you how to get faster fingers in just one week.