I had a guitar student who had been playing guitar for several years but did not know about a very important technique called alternate picking. So I opened up his eyes to this great technique and in a matter of weeks he had made more progress with his picking ability than he had in all his previous years of playing! The idea is that to help improve speed and efficiency, we alternate between up strokes and down strokes, instead of using consecutive downstrokes.

The exercises in this lesson will ensure that you develop impressive alternate picking technique. After a few months of practicing these, you will feel as if your right hand is possessed! But be sure to practice these exercises slowly. You do not want to play these fast and sloppy. Only play them as fast as you can while maintaining clean, accurate technique. Use a metronome as often as possible, and play them with and without distortion. And if you have an acoustic, be sure to practice on that as well. Playing picking exercises on an acoustic forces you to become a cleaner player.

This is the exercise that got me into alternate picking. It came from a Paul Gilbert video. I would be doing you an injustice if I didn't include it here (sorry Paul!).

Here we see where on the fretboard we will be playing this exercise. If you have done the Diatonic Scale lesson, then you will notice that the notes are embedded within the Mixolydian mode shape that I showed you.

I prefer to start this one out with a downstroke, as I have shown on the Tab. But do whatever works for you. The toughest part of this exercise is of course the crossing over of the strings. When doing these exercises try to move your wrist and hand as little as possible. Try to develop a light picking technique. You will develop a crisper picking sound that way (i.e. not so much sound from the pick attack). I think you will find this exercise to be a real confident booster. At first it will be tough, but after a while you will be playing it like I do on the fast audio clip. Trust me - you will get there if you practice!