Featured Lesson
5 Minute String
Crossing for pickstyle
Fast alternate picking sounds great in any style
of guitar playing. The nature of this technique makes picking on a
single string a relatively easy feat to accomplish with some
practice. Things become trickier when using
alternate picking for crossing strings. Here are two exercises to
practice that involve picking "between" two strings and
picking on the "outside" of a set of two strings. You
may hear this commonly referred to as "inside" and
"outside" picking. If you're not too sure of the
definitions at this stage, don't worry. It will become clear when
you have played through the examples. How to
practice these:
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Firstly, isolate the means whereby you cross
strings. If you use the picking hand wrist, this is what you
will be focusing on. If you cross strings from the elbow,
focus on that.
-
Practice them extremely slowly at first and
make sure the movements are perfect.
-
Practice on a clean guitar tone and listen
carefully for any unwanted string crossing noises
-
The patterns are written so that they can be
repeated as many times as you would like, so repeat them, and
once you have a handle on them, play them up and down the
neck, and on all string sets.
-
Read the article entitled R.A.C.S
to get some additional ideas on what to look for in your
practice.
-
Start each exercise on a DOWNSTROKE and
alternate pick every note. If you do not do this, you will be
missing the point of the exercise.
-
Use one finger per fret
-
Play as 8th or 16th notes
Fig. 1 Inside Picking
Some people might find this pattern awkward at first. Remember:
Awkward usually just means you should slow the exercise down and
pay closer attention to it. ;-)
Fig. 2 Outside Picking
Remember to start on a downstroke and take care not to hit any
string by mistake as you cross over it to follow with an upstroke.
There are pleny more of this type of exercise to
train for string crossing, but that's it for now. Remember to
start them slowly and once you are comfortable, work them up
to crazy speeds.
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