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Alternate Picking Technique

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

Scales and Exercises

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. Also, it's something that you can use to develop your alternate picking technique as well.

C Major Scale

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

1. Right Hand Position: Place your right hand on the bridge as we discussed.
2. Starting Note: Begin with a down stroke on the C note, which is the first note.

Alternate Picking Pattern

Every note that follows it, every picked note, is going to be in the opposite pick direction to the previous one:

• Pattern: Down, up, down, up, down, up.

And that is alternate picking.

Practice Exercise

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

• Count In: 2, 3, 4.
• Picking Sequence: Down, up, down, up, down, up, down, up.

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

Observations

Hopefully, you've noticed 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.

Picking Example:
Down, up, down, up, down, up.

You can practice that with various scales, or you might even just pick a few notes on a couple of strings.

Additional Practice

For example, you can:

• Go to the third fret on the D string and play 3, 5.
• Then do the same on the next string, 3, 5.
• Repeat back and forth between those: Down, up, down, up.

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

Listening and Improvement

I think it's important to say, and it may sound silly, but 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 yourself in that situation, what can be very useful is:

• Recording on your phone or laptop, just a bit of audio or video.
• Listening to it back while you're not having to concentrate so hard.

Ask yourself:

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

And then try it again. It's a really good thing to do.