Hey Friend,
Today’s exercises are designed to focus primarily on your picking hand.
When you play through them, be very strict with yourself - the picking direction needs to be followed to get the most benefit out of these exercises.
We are training your hands to be disciplined and to work as efficiently as possible, so be a task master on yourself.
Excellence requires doing things most people won’t do. This is one of those little things you can do to separate yourself from the masses.
This picking direction discipline will help ALL your playing, so don’t let its lack of complexity fool you.
Here are the files:
In exercises 2 and 3, you will be playing multiple pick strokes on each string. Pay particular attention to the picking direction when you are changing strings so you maintain the proper pattern.
You might not recognize the notation on exercises 2 and 3 - each bar (measure) has four sets of three notes. These are known as triplets.
When you play triplets, there are three notes played within the beat. Hence the little ‘3’ in brackets above the notes.
This obviously requires more pick strokes and faster playing, so if the tempo is too fast to play the riff cleanly using the correct pick direction, slow it down.
Take your metronome and set it to 50 BPM (beats per minute) and see if you can do that. If not, slow it to 40 BPM. If you don’t have a metronome, here’s a list of cheap or free metronomes you can get for your phone.
We’re not going for speed here - we’re interested in picking discipline - teaching your muscles to do what you want them to do.
The slower you start off learning these, the better.
Old habits die hard, and you’ll find that it’s very easy to get off-track with your picking direction, especially at higher speeds.
You have to train your hands to follow the pattern. In time, efficient picking will be automatic.
Enjoy!
Peace~
Dave | 
