Guitar Speed Picking Drills For Smoother Technique & Badass Shred Skills
A great guitar speed picking drill doesn’t just help you pick faster, it helps you pick faster, cleaner and more consistent.
Killer shred technique requires all three elements.
Fortunately, you’re in the right place to turn your speed picking from average to badass.
Use the three speed picking drills below to develop amazing shred technique that adds a jolt of lightning to anything you play:
Develop Insanely Consistent & Fast Speed Using Upstroke Practice
Fact: When it comes to picking technique, our downstrokes are much stronger and consistent than our upstrokes.
Why does this matter?
If upstrokes and downstrokes are both a part of the machine that is our picking technique, having one half of the machine be stronger throws everything out of whack.
This makes your picking technique less consistent, causing sloppy mistakes.
Make your upstrokes as strong as your downstrokes and your picking techniques instantly becomes faster and cleaner than ever before!
Use this guitar speed picking drill to improve your upstrokes:
1. Practice any guitar lick you are familiar with using only upstrokes for 20 repetitions. You’ll need to play the lick at a slower tempo than normal.
2. Repeat step one for another 20 repetitions using a powerful pick attack like demonstrated in this video:3. Pick the notes of the lick 3 times each using upstrokes only until you’ve played through every note 20 times. Do this in quick bursts with a short rest after each one.
After this exercise, go back and play the guitar lick like normal. It now feels MUCH easier.
Improve Your Ability To Pick With Articulation Using Speed Picking Focus Training
Being able to focus and hear individual notes while playing fast is a powerful asset for clean playing.
Why?
Because you want to keep everything in sync together. When you are able to articulate a note, it trains your mind to hear it more clearly. Learn how to articulate every note in a guitar lick and you learn how to play every note in that lick perfectly.
Sound good?
Thought so!
Use this guitar speed picking drill to train yourself to perfect the notes of a lick by articulating them with your pick:
Choose any open string.
Alternate pick the string at a moderate tempo in sequences of 5 notes at a time (count this in your head as you pick).
Accent the very first note of the sequence using more picking power.
Repeat the previous step 10 times.
Now alternate between picking the string as you just were and speed picking the notes.
Like this:
1 2 3 4 5 – 12345 – 1 2 3 4 5 – 12345
Accent the first note of the tremolo picking sequence similar to how extra picking power is used to lock the student’s hands in sync in this video (starting at 1:26):Apply Speed Picking To Scales & Push Your Limits Within A Single Practice Session
Improving your speed picking on guitar isn’t just about picking a single open note or fretted note.
Applying speed picking into many different scenarios helps you integrate it smoothly into your overall guitar technique.
This gives you smooth and effortless guitar speed just like you want!
A great way to get started integrating speed picking into your everyday playing is to practice it with the guitar scales you are familiar with (in addition to practice the scales like normal).
Use this drill to improve your speed picking musicality using scales:
1.
Choose any guitar scale you are familiar with.
2.
Practice the scale as you normally would.
3.
Practice the scale by tremolo picking each note.
Over time, see how fast you can play to a metronome while tremolo picking three
notes for every note in the scale.
4. Improvise freely using the first 5 notes of the scale while focusing on using tremolo picking together with non-tremolo picked notes. Think of 10 different phrases.
Practicing the drills on this page for just 10-15 minutes per day gets massive results for your speed picking technique.
Try them out for just a couple of weeks and see the difference it makes.