Alternate picking

Alternate Picking Technique

Okay, so let's start getting these hands working together. Now, we're going to talk about alternate picking.

If you've got the grade books, you'll have access to lots of scales. It doesn't really matter which one you pick, but these are all great exercises to help the synchronization between your hands. It's also something that you can use to develop your alternate picking technique as well.

C Major Scale

So, what we're going to use today is the C major scale. This will be in the technical exercises, as I said, and we're going to practice this alternate picking.

Hand Position and Playing

• Right Hand Position: Place your right hand on the bridge, as we discussed.
• Starting Note: Begin with a downstroke on the C note (the first note).

Every note that follows it, every pick note that follows, is going to be in the opposite pick direction to the previous one. So it's going to start with:

• Down
• Up
• Down
• Up
• Down
• Up

And that is alternate picking.

Let's have a go at it: Nice and slowly.

Here we go: 2, 3, 4.
Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

You can try this with any of your scales. The C major scale is quite a good one because there are different numbers of notes on each string, which means it's a little bit of a challenge for your right hand to get used to.

Observations

What hopefully you've noticed is that my downstrokes and my upstrokes don't involve different hand techniques. I'm not rotating my wrist with extreme rotations or anything like that. It's all just nice and relaxed.

• Downstroke: There's my downstroke.
• Upstroke: There's my upstroke.

Repeat: Down, up, down, up, down, up.

You can practice that with lots of different scales, or you might even just pick a few notes on a couple of strings and practice it across a pair of strings.

Example Exercise

For example, maybe if we go to the third fret on the D string and just go 3, 5, and then the same on the next string, 3, 5.

Just repeat back and forth between those:
Down, up, down, up.

Practice Tips

This is something you can practice with a metronome. Gradually build up the speed, and just make sure that at all times you're feeling in control of what your right hand is doing.

It's important to say, though it might sound silly, make sure you're listening to the quality of the sound that's coming out. It's easy to concentrate so hard that you forget to listen to what's actually happening.

If you find that happening, what can be really useful is just recording on your phone or laptop, just a bit of audio or video, and then listening to it back while you're not having to actually concentrate.

Ask yourself:

• How did that sound?
• What could I do to improve it?

Then, try it again. It's a really good thing to do.