Why Fast Alternate Picking Speed Sometimes Slows You Down
Think playing with fast guitar speed means using alternate picking for everything you play?
Think again!
Even if you alternate pick at fast speeds, this approach often causes big problems that actually slow down your playing.
Why?
Answer: Alternate picking is often not the most efficient or economical way to play patterns on guitar. This causes you to waste motion and energy that ultimately slows you down and causes sloppy mistakes.
Here are two examples of ways to make your picking technique more efficient, speeding up your playing and minimizing mistakes in the process:
Example #1: Make Alternate Picking Hand Motion Minimal & Precise
Many guitar players have a tendency to waste motion in their picking hand while alternate picking for speed.
Why?
They’ve been told that getting faster requires moving one’s hand faster.
Bad idea!
The key to faster and more clean guitar playing is moving your hand with efficiency.
This way you strike the string as many times as possible in as little time as possible.
This is completely different than simply “moving your hand faster.”
Watch this video to see a demonstration of the difference between these two ideas and how to make your picking hand movement efficient for faster playing:Example #2: Avoid Using Extra Picking Motion In Your Pick Attack During Scale Runs
Another frequently overlooked, yet critically important aspect of fast guitar playing is cutting down on unnecessary pick strokes while switching from one string to the next.
While alternate picking everything, you use more pick strokes than needed, resulting in wasted movement and energy.
This leads to sloppy playing at fast speeds.
You massively speed up your guitar playing and accuracy when you make your picking technique more efficient during string transitions.
This video shows you exactly why and how to do it:Want to learn a way to quickly master this style of efficient picking technique for killer speed?
You got it!
Here are two exercises to get you started
Exercise 1 – Use simple chromatic runs in the same position.
Quickly getting better at any new technique is easier when you isolate the movements needed to perform it as much as possible.
To do this using efficient picking in your picking hand, isolate the picking motion by staying in one fretboard position.
Like this:
Practicing this simple 3-note chromatic exercise removes your focus from what is going on the fretting hand by making the pattern something you can easily play on mental auto-pilot mode.
It then becomes easy to focus on the movement in your picking hand, so you can make sure that you are maintaining momentum in your pick attack from string to string (as explained in the video).
Here is another way to practice:
Practice any guitar scale of your choice by playing the notes of each string 3 times, like shown in the E minor scale below:
This challenges you to quickly move to the next string using efficient picking. This makes the exercise more like natural playing so you become prepared to pick with efficient technique in times when you aren’t just playing a scale note-for-note up and down the fretboard.
Now you understand why there are more ways to pick fast on guitar than just alternate picking and how conventional picking approaches often can slow you down.
The next step is to learn how to practice guitar to make massive leaps in playing speed while practice less time overall.
Sound impossible?
It’s not!
Learn how to double your guitar speed (for free) right away by downloading this powerful shred guitar eBook.