Use These Alternate Picking Exercises for Faster, More Accurate Picking!

Want to get faster and more accurate picking in your solos? Then take a look at this lesson to learn a short but super powerful alternate picking and left hand workout!

In this lesson you’ll discover:

• How to use this short workout to develop an accurate, fast and fluent alternate picking technique
• How to move it all around the guitar neck so you can nail your picking at every fret and on every string!
• How to avoid some of the common things that hold guitarists up and stop them from getting great picking chops!

Plus,this exercise will improve your left hand and right hand synchronisation making playing great licks and solos much easier. Have fun!

Alternate Picking Exercises – Exercise for Faster, More Accurate Picking!

Need some alternate picking exercises to supercharge your alternate picking technique, fret hand accuracy and speed? In this video I’ll show you a cool alternate picking exercise you can use to do exactly that. Let’s dive in and start boosting your alternate picking!

0:10 In this lesson you’ll learn a short alternate picking exercise for powering up your picking and fretting hand speed, accuracy and co-ordination. It’s not the most musical of exercises and you probably wouldn’t play it in a solo, but it’s a powerful workout for your alternate picking and a great warmup exercise too.

0:42 Alternate picking exercises like this can be moved around anywhere on the guitar but we’ll start on the D string at the 5th fret.
Follow the picking guidelines and fingering guidelines here for step 1 of the exercise.

1:00 Metronome practice exercise. Here’s how you can use your metronome to build up your technique with an exercise like this. The metronome is set to 66bpm and I’ll play the exercise once with a little rest in between, then repeat this process.

1:20 Alternate picking exercises like this will only work if you develop good habits as you practice them! Notice how my fret hand and picking hand are staying close to the guitar and keeping movement to a minimum. Extra movement is unnecessary and will slow you down!

1:37 Step 2 of the alternate picking exercise introduces a string crossing move. Move the 2nd note from the exercise over onto the next string. Follow the picking pattern!

2:20 Practice it with the metronome like we did with step one earlier. It’s still set to 66bpm.

2:39 Step 3 of this picking exercise moves 2 notes across onto the next string. This changes the alternate picking pattern and the fretting hand movement. Alternate picking exercises which make you pick in several different ways like this are a powerful way to boost your picking skills and fluency.

3:09 The metronome can be used as before on this step of the exercise.

3:24 The final part of the exercise moves another note onto the next string. We can build up the strength and accuracy of our fingers with alternate picking exercises which use all 4 fingers of our fretting hand like we’re doing here.

3:38 Metronome demonstration.

3:47 Let’s join up each step to create a complete alternate picking workout. Each step is played twice before moving to the next one. Keep in time with the metronome and keep the picking and fingering correct as you play it.

4:10 As you get the hang of it you can gradually increase the speed of the metronome. Keep the exercise the same but just just push your speed a little. I’ll demo it at 88bpm and then 100bpm.

4:40 Alternate picking exercises like this can be moved anywhere on the guitar neck and still work. Here I demo it in some other places.

4:50 Some players think exercises like this are boring…and they can be for sure! But it’s worth devoting a little time to them because they develop your playing technique in a very focused way and can get you results pretty fast. Also they’re a great way to warm up when you start your practice session.

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