Hey Friend,

Up until now, we’ve focused on the melodic and harmonic patterns that repeat all over the guitar neck.

We looked at intervals in their fundamental state - the space between two individual notes - and combining two or more notes to play double stops and chords.

Let’s start looking at some of the rhythmic patterns that go into playing guitar.

It would be easy to start off with musical patterns like time signatures, but why don’t we look at something even more basic to guitar - picking patterns.

Whether you’re wanting to learn how to play the solo(s) to "Hotel California” or you’re plucking your first note ever, making sound on a guitar requires you to jar the strings.

You can gently brush your finger over it, pluck it with a pick or fingernail, slap it with the side of your thumb or pinch and pull it. 

Something has to force the string to move so that it can create the vibrations that produce sound.

Easy enough, right?

Well, not so fast. 

You also have to learn how to do all this “string moving” in time with the song rhythm.

Not too difficult on songs where the tempo is nice and slow. But once you get past 100 beats per minute (BPM) and quarter notes, it can get sloppy quick!

That’s why picking patterns were developed over time.

Downstroke plucking works fine when playing on a single string at slow speeds or keeping a simple rhythm, but again, once the tempo starts speeding up, you can’t maintain a steady rhythm for long playing downstroke (or upstroke, for that matter) string hits.

So new techniques to increase playing speed were developed by guitar pioneers. As shredding became more popular, guitarists were analyzing and testing new ways to be more efficient in their playing - because efficiency in pick strikes could equate to faster riffs.

Alternate picking has been around for quite some time, but techniques like hybrid picking, economy/directional picking and sweep picking. became the next steps in the evolution of guitar soloing. 

Over the next few lessons, let’s look at these different picking patterns and practice them together. We’ll start with the simple downstrokes, then play with upstroke exercises and then go to the more advanced stuff.

Hope y’all have a good Wednesday. Rock on!

Peace~

Dave