Speed Picking
Improving Your Speed Picking Technique
I had a viewer leave a comment wondering about how he could improve his speed picking technique.
So for the viewer who wrote in and anyone else interested in improving their speed picking technique, here is an exercise below that you can add to your daily practice schedule that will help.
Developing a speedy and efficient picking technique is something that requires dedicated practice if you want to seriously increase your picking speed.
Practicing
Sitting down and practicing with a metronome for say 15 or 20 minutes a day is all you should have to do to accomplish this.
The thing is to give yourself a couple good months of practice incorporating different exercises focused on improving your speed and you will definitely see an improvement.
Measuring Your Progress
One way to measure your success, to keep you motivated and practicing regularly is to use a metronome. Write the speed used for each exercise down on a sheet of paper so you can track your progress as time goes by.
You should easily start seeing an improvement only after just a few weeks of this daily speed picking practice.
There are also some good alternate picking exercises that you can use to get you started with, on the page that I posted called Guitar Exercises - Developing Picking Technique.
Get An Idea Of How Fast You Can Pick
A good way to give you an idea of the speed at which you should be able to eventually get too, is to alternate pick an open string as fast as you can. You will probably notice that you can do this pretty fast when you are not using your left hand to fret the strings.
The area that usually needs to be worked on is getting your fingers on your fretting hand to keep up and stay in sync with your picking hand.
A way to work on this is to train the fingers on your frethand to use small and efficient movements while moving from note to note.
Benefits Of This Speed Picking Exercise
The purpose of the exercise below is to promote an economy of movement in the frethand fingers, while training your picking and frethand fingers to stay in sync with one another. Both of these benefits will help to increase your picking speed.
Speed Picking Exercise - "The Spider"
Let's start with an exercise that has helped me in developing a speedy and efficient picking technique. This exercise is borrowed from the book by Peter Ficsher called "Rock Guitar Techniques".
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It is an excellent book that helps you with a variety of different guitar playing techniques used by some of today's top guitarists like Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Eric Johnson to name a few.
Peters Ficsher's books are also in
a modular format meaning that you can jump in and start learning whatever it is
you want to learn without having to start at the beginning of the book. Each
section is complete
in itself. Check out Peter's book
This exercise is referred to as the spider and it uses a 4 note per string pattern. Alternate pick each note.
The trick to this exercise is to pick the note and leave the finger that was just used to fret the note, down on the string until it is needed again to fret the next note on the next string below.
As you finish playing the first 4 notes in the pattern, you would then take your 1st finger off the first fret of the 6th string and move it down to the 1st fret of the 5th string, while still leaving the other 3 fingers down, still fretting the notes on the 6th string.
Now take your 2nd finger off the previously fretted note on the 6th string above and move it down to the next string, placing the 2nd finger down on the second fret of the 5th string.
At this stage you should have the 1st and 2nd fingers fretting the notes on the 5th string while still holding the 3rd and 4th fingers down on the 6th string above.
Follow the same procedure as you move your 3rd and 4th fingers down to fret the notes on the 5th string.
For this exercise, start at a speed which you can play all the notes cleanly and accurately.
Remember to keep fingers down on notes until they are needed again for the next string.
Work your way up the neck to say the 12th fret, then work your way back down.
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This is only one exercise that you can incorporate into your daily 15-20 minute speed picking practice schedule.
I will post more in the future so stay tuned.
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