Hey Friend,
Feeling confident enough in how alternate picking works? How did the exercises go?
As long as you practice maintaining that strict down/up picking pattern, you’re developing important muscle memory that will serve you well as we look to the next level in picking patterns.
There’s another point I want to bring up about practicing these techniques.
When you are working on becoming proficient with these picking patterns, focus only on what you’re picking hand is doing. Your fretting hand is secondary, as is the tone and quality of the notes you’re playing.
Most of the time we put our effort into the finished product - how our playing sounds.
Overall, that’s the goal - to sound the best we can. But to get there, we need to dig deeper into each technique we learn.
Think of it like an automobile. We see a car as a finished product, but it’s made up of thousands of individual parts.
In most cases, auto manufacturers make improvements on their models by isolating components that might not be working as well or efficiently as they could be. They replace the components, or improve on them.
We can do the same for our playing.
When learning a new technique or working at mastering it, we can isolate each aspect of the technique and devote practice time to each.
For example, the alternate picking exercises I sent you last week. What are the main actions of the technique itself?
First, the down/up motion I mentioned earlier. But you also have your fingering of the notes…
And there’s how you’re holding your pick…
And the pick attack (how forceful you pluck each note)…
The sound quality of each note…
And so on…
See how you can isolate your practicing to the smallest detail? You can take each detail and build a practice session around it.
When you begin to look at guitar practice as a way to really hone your skills and apply focused effort to the details of a technique, you can massively accelerate your progress.
Right now, the main goal of the picking pattern exercises I’m sending you is to train your picking hand to the patterns - to build that muscle memory so that picking is a subconscious act.
That way you can begin to focus on how things sound rather than plucking the correct string or getting to the next note easily.
Think about the act of playing guitar and make a list of all the physical actions you can identify. That will give you an idea of all the things you can work on to improve your playing.
I admit, that could become an intimidating list, but fortunately, improving in one area tends to help others get better as well.
We’ll start looking at the next level in the evolution of picking technique on Friday - Economy/Directional picking. Rock on!
Peace~
Dave
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