Cross picking

Cross Picking Technique

One thing I briefly want to touch on with you is Jesse McReynolds. I mentioned him in passing because he developed a technique called cross picking and another one called split string. Let me just demonstrate for you the basic cross picking pattern.

What is Cross Picking?

Really, what he's doing with the mandolin here is almost copying a banjo-like roll, a banjo sound of a five-string banjo in a bluegrass band, but doing it with a flat pick.

I can't call out the pick directions and do it at the same time, so you'll have to look at the website where I've diagrammed out what your right hand is doing in a basic cross pick pattern.

Practice Suggestions

• I will provide you with some double stops which we covered, say in the key of G or over the chord of G major.
• You can play that pattern and just get accustomed to the sound and how to produce the sound with your right hand.

It's really something you can just play around with.

Once you get comfortable, you can take maybe a song whose melody you've worked out one way, and if it's not too fast, you can then figure out a cross pick version where you're incorporating the melody notes into this cross pick pattern.

Advanced Techniques

The most developed version of this is Jesse McReynolds. Although he has a basic pattern, he just varies that pattern and breaks out of it, doing all kinds of things.

For now, I think it would be good just to learn the basic pattern.

Demonstration

So again, I'll be playing double stops over a G major chord. But before I do that, let me just play it open for you.

Here is the pattern played one time through.

So then if I place some of these double stops, it sounds like this: G7, G7 (because I'm playing that F note flat at seventh).