Picking Practice For Guitar: Instant Upgrades to Your Playing
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Picking practice is one of the most overlooked elements of guitar playing. We all know how to do it, but how can we improve? Let’s delve into the fundamental foundations of picking practice for guitar.
Picking Practice For Guitar: Instant Upgrades to Your Playing
So, what do we know already? Well, we know our pick is our lord and saviour in electric guitar playing. From day one chances are you were presented with that ever-so-important small piece of plastic.
There are, of course, several different types of picking practice to consider! Down, alternate, hybrid, tremolo and sweep picking to name a few. All of the above will have their uses depending on what song you’re looking at playing.
For extra information, why not check out or pick of right-hand techniques? Anyway, let’s look at how we can improve some picking basics which will ultimately provide instant upgrades to your playing.
Using a Metronome
Firstly, we’ll be looking at an age-old aid that has been helping musicians since the early 1800s!
A quick Google search will bring up a metronome instantly, along with many other alternatives. This will provide you with an easily adjustable digital metronome.
Picking practice with a metronome is very straightforward. It’s a good way to go over some riffs that you may be working on too. We want to set a desired speed and play accordingly to a set of crotchet beats in a 4/4 time signature.
Picking Practice – Google Search Metronome
There are also some great metronomes on the market. Whether mechanical or digital:
Using Scales
Getting familiar with practising to a click will no doubt help you with many other guitar-playing endeavours. Here though, we’re going to use it with some simple scales.
If you haven’t looked at them before, a scale is a series of musically ordered notes based on a pitch. There are many to choose from. From the Mixolydian to Harmonic Minor, we’re going to stick to the humble Pentatonic scale.
Take a look at the TAB below. Here is the 1st position of the pentatonic scale in A minor. This picking practice can be done in many ways. Ideally, we’d start with down picking, whereby you would pick each note with a downward pick. Then you can work your way up to alternate picking. Simple, yet effective.
Picking Practice For Guitar – Using Scales
Picking Practice with String Skipping
Now we’re going to look at something less conventional when it comes to picking practice. Overall improving picking accuracy and your ability to play cool licks and riffs!
By playing through a series of notes, we can easily improve the standard of your picking. However, by going through an exercise that involves skipping a string, you’ll be forced to think a bit more about where you’re picking.
For this one, I like to use alternate picking, down up down up. Working up and down the fretboard with the spider exercise. Here, we’ll play the first four notes as crotchets, and then do the same but on a contrasting string.
Picking Practice For Guitar – String Skipping
For Whom The Bell Tolls – Metallica
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Now that we’ve looked at some foundation-picking practice, let’s put it into action. Kicking us off, here’s this menacing Metallica riff.
With this one, we’ll be picking downstrokes with power chords. Downpicking is one of James Hetfield’s trademark guitar techniques. A power chord is a chord that contains only the route note and the perfect 5th above it. For example, a G power chord, G5, would be the notes G and D played together.
Take a look at the TAB, we’re working with quavers, otherwise known as eighth notes. Whereby, we have eight notes per bar of four beats. We can count one bar as 1+ 2+, 3+ 4+. Time to get chugging!
Picking Practice For Guitar – For Whom The Bell Tolls
When playing this classic from 1984, it’s only right that you sound the part too. Just like our list of picking techniques, these EMG JH pickups will be an instant upgrade to your setup!
Last Resort – Papa Roach
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Concluding our look at picking practice for guitar is this alternative metal number from Papa Roach. Kicking up the speed and intensity with our picking.
Unlike the rest of our examples, we need to down-tune to Drop D. To do this, simply down-tune the low E-string until it is the same pitch as the open D string. Feel free to pop over to our pick of the top 5 Drop D riffs for more!
As previously stated, this one is more difficult compared to our other examples. Although only being 91bpm, we’re playing in double time at 182bpm. Furthermore, we’re incorporating alternate picking across a series of semi-quavers. Commonly referred to as sixteenth notes. 1e+a 2e+a 3e+a 4e+a.
Picking Practice For Guitar – Last Resort
How cool does this look? This Schecter Demon S-II has everything you’ll need for heavy, fast playing. With a slim C profile neck for crazy riffs and a set of active humbuckers for all of your chugging needs.
Picking Practice For Guitar: Practice makes perfect!
There we have it, a rundown of entry-level techniques that will return instant upgrades to your playing! It’s deceptive how important basic techniques can be. If you would like to see more technique and theory-based content, please let us know!
Of course, you’ll need a good selection of guitar picks. Here are some good places to start:
Video:
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