Alternate picking is something that you will need to implement into your guitar skills. It teaches beginner players, who usually always down stroke or up stroke.

While this will be fine when you are first learning, you will want to learn this at some point to increase the fluid motion and efficiency of using this technique. This technique is a process of picking up and down, alternatively, on the string to create a much greater ease of fast picking. The results are a great deal less tension in your arm and energy used, and a much more fluid and smooth playing.

Beginners tend to have trouble learning this technique, and I’d like to give a few pointers on what they can do to improve.

One of the main problems that comes with alternate picking is picking a string in the wrong direction when you are about to move on to a different string. Let’s say your last pick was a downstroke on the G string, and your next pick is an up stroke on the D string. Your pick has to do a much more complicated stroke then if you were to simply pick up on the G string and Down on the D string.

It will be difficult at first to want to do this because it will be going against your natural way of picking, but to really limit ourselves by not learning the proper techniques would be terrible for your progression.

It’s also important to know that the motion from this comes from your wrist and your fingers, and you should not have a great deal of tension in your arm, or movement from your elbow (except when changing strings).

Practice picking between different strings with a few notes on each string. Make sure you start the picking with the right stroke either up or down, so when you move on to the next string you’re not picking in the opposite direction of the next string, but in the same direction as it. This will make things much easier and you will be able to get this technique down a lot faster and in the correct manner.

When you’re doing this exercise, start of playing the lick slow. Play it as fast as you can but it’s only at the point to where each note rings completely clean. Once you master that tempo, bump it up to where you are slightly uncomfortable at that speed. Then once you master that faster tempo, keep moving up in speed.

Good luck to all you guitarists out there! I hope you found this article very helpful.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 28th, 2009 at 7:00 pm and is filed under Beginners Learning. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.