Alternate picking

Getting Your Hands Working Together: Alternate Picking

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 with the synchronization between your hands. Additionally, it's something that you can use to develop your alternate picking technique as well.

Today's Focus: 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.

Technique Setup

1. Place your right hand on the bridge as we discussed.
2. Begin with a downstroke on the C note (the first note).

Every note that follows, every pick note, will be in the opposite pick direction to the previous one. It will go like this:

• Down
• Up
• Down
• Up
• Down
• Up

And that is alternate picking.

Practice Exercise

Okay, let's have a go at it, nice and slowly. Here we go:

Count in: 2, 3, 4.
Play: Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

Tips for Practice

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 bit of a challenge for your right hand to get used to.

What hopefully you've noticed is that my downstrokes and 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. Here's how it goes:

• Downstroke
• Upstroke
• Down, up, down, up

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

Example Exercise

For example, if we go to the third fret on the D string, you could:

• Play 3, 5 on the D string
• Then the same on the next string (3, 5)

Just repeat back and forth between those:

• Down, up, down, up.

Building Speed and Control

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.

Listening to Your Playing

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 to just record on your phone or laptop, either audio or video. Then listen to it back while you're not concentrating on playing. You can reflect on:

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

Then, try it again. It's a really good practice technique.