Building a methodical alternate picking practice routine

Playing Technique
#1

Hi!
I’m sure this question came up before, but here goes-
I’m a music performance student, I play hours and hours every day, mostly working on harmony and bebop improv. However, all the fancy jazz aside, I’m still just a guitar player that wants to get to shredder territory :wink:
So realistically I have about 45-60 minutes a day to focus solely on technique. I practice legato, hybrid and sweep picking too, so let’s say that leaves me with 15 minutes of super focused alternate picking practice. What do you think is the best way to use that time to build speed? Knowing myself I respond best to methodical, consistent and measurable practice (“Yesterday my top clean speed for lick X was 142, today I’ll try 143” kind of stuff). Should I mostly play licks and musical fragments or chromatic exercises? How about slowly bumping the metronome vs. speed bursts? pure “athletic” stuff like tremolo? If something specific worked for you I’d love to hear.
If it helps, I am a very obvious Eric Johnson style downward pickslant kinda guy. I might upload a critique video soon.
Again sorry if this was asked a million times before and for the long post, I’m just super motivated to get better at this and I’m kinda lost on how to do it! Thanks

tl;dr - What is the best way to practice alternate picking speed in 15-20 minutes every day?

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Daily Guitar routine
Practice Schedule
#2

Two old videos:

Petrucci Rock Discipilne

Gambale Chop Builder

Those two have A LOT of alternate picking exercises.

The examples in the Petrucci one goes all the way from slow to ultra fast.

The Gambale one is an hour of guitar aerobic, played all the time at 120bpm, but even at that speed to play it really well is a challenge. When you got that covered, simply speed up the video, or play it by yourself making the click go faster.

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#3

Hi! We’ll have a lot more to say on this issue in the coming months, but the short story is that I don’t think speed is “built” or “worked up to” over time like you do with exercises at the gym. Hand speed is probably something you already have. Being able to do guitar movements at those speeds accurately is another story. So it’s more like like learning to dance. Waving your arms rapidly and doing dance moves rapidly might be the same athletically in terms of movement speed, but the one case requires specific coordination to do correctly.

So if you’re trying to learn a specific picking movement, fast is where you start. If you can’t at least attempt the movement once semi-correctly at your fast speed, you’re unlikely to get it at a slower speed because the two can feel so radically different.

So, short story, trial and error. Get instructions for how the target movements work, where you need to place your hand, which joint(s) to move, and so on. Try it fast. If it doesn’t work, change something and try again. Keep doing this, in somewhat unstructured fashion, with no metronome and no particular target tempo in mind. Just medium fast to fast. Once you click with a movement, even briefly, try to reproduce it. If you can, then you can slow it down a touch and see if you can reproduce it slightly cleaner.

And so on. Here are some more thoughts on this in video form:

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#4

So, to jump straight to the next obvious follow-up question…

For a player like me who’s been playing more than 2 decades, has made strides building a more effiicient string-changing mechanic, but whose core alternate picking along a single string isn’t all that fast… What DO you do to try to build a faster pickstroke?

I mean, it’s probably a little academic here, since I’m not exactly slow - I’d say I probably top out around 16ths in 180-190bpm, which is probably fast enough for anything I’m likely to want to play… But there are definitely guys out there who can alternate pick repeated patterns on a single string significantly faster than that, and I’ve always thought one of the major points of building picking speed is to push the envelope of where you maintain control of your playing well past where you need it to be, so you’re playing even your fastest lines easily in perfect control.

Just do single-string burst workouts, steadily ratcheting up the metronome speed? Honestly, I’ve gotten through the first two decades of my playing career mostly just relying on legato for faster work, so I guess this is actually a good problem to have – that this community has gotten my picking to the point where single string picking skill is even starting to become a concern for me again, haha.

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#5

I would go through each of the picking mechanics that troy goes over. (wrist in both directions, forearm, elbow, and fingers, and combinations of everything.

The truth is that any of the above mechanics has the potential to go very fast, but you really gotta try them all out. And to do that, you have to be familiar with it. Your final ‘speedy’ form may end up using a mechanic that you never really considered.

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#6

By repeatedly trying to go fast while specifically attempting to do one of the motions that we know works for speed. The most basic ones are probably all the single escape motions: elbow, forearm, or any of the wrist motions, either upstroke escape or downstroke escape.

I think a lot of us essentially did some version of this much younger, didn’t realize we were doing anything important, and weren’t really paying too much attention to whether it was working or not. We just know that a year or so later we had “speed” and didn’t know what motion or motions we were using, or how they developed.

If you haven’t ever actually tried to do one of these motions by going as fast and smoothly as you can from the get-go, then that may be why these skills never materialized. I’m not saying everyone needs a fast picking technique so much as a smooth / useful one. But if you want that higher gear you have to practice like a damn teenager!

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#7

I think the only “gym” like aspect of building speed is developing the endurance required to play fast for long periods of time. I can play pretty fast in speed bursts, but I feel tension (or fatigue - it can be hard for me to tell the difference) if i try to play fast for longer than those bursts.

So I feel like building endurance is probably a big thing as well.

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#8

Yeah, that’s a huge topic on its own. And just like in long-distance running, having the right form is really crucial. Having the most relaxed form as possible, and having the most efficient mechanic… but not to the point where your motions are too small. It’s a give & take kinda thing.

#9

I have a young relative who’s recently started playing guitar, and with about 5 minutes of coaching from me re: different ways to try to pick a single note as fast as you can, he almost immediately was able to do a rudimentary Vinnie Moore style UWPS elbow mechanic with lots of speed, though of course he wasn’t hitting the strings consistently yet. But the basic motion, with speed, was there pretty much instantly once the idea was explained to him.

#10

@Brendan also does this. Same exact results - super fast, occasionally missing the string entirely. So it’s blazing speed - dropouts - blazing speed - dropouts, etc. He’s actually substantially faster than me with pure elbow.

I think that’s turning out to be the basic idea. The speed is there, the coordination is what needs to be “worked up to” over time.

#11

I think many of us went through this early on, when we were exploring ‘shredding’. It’s a bit like picking on steroids… and gives you instant results, but not much control.

I think the elbow is super-useful for picking, but it really needs to be mixed-in with another mechanic (wrist, forearm, fingers), and for this mix to be accomplished, the arm needs to be relaxed.

There was another guy on the forum who posted his elbow mechanic on acoustic, and it was incredible. He could alternate between two non-adjacent strings at about 140 bpm 16ths, and it sounded seamless. Hs elbow took care of the speed/exertion, and his subtle finger/wrist movements took care of the finesse.

#12

It really depends. Many great mandolin players rely on pure elbow for tremolo which is not mixed with anything and doesn’t need to be. Chris Thile is a great example of how seamlessly the wrist and elbow stuff can be transitioned:

I know you’ve become a crosspicking convert but pickslanting techniques have a place in the world and the best players use them for a reason.

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#13

While it’s tough to tell from this video, I think he is still using tiny remnants of his wrist mechanic in his tremolo picking.

And I am not suggesting that the non-elbow mechanic is only for the purposes of adding an escape path. To me, it’s about the the tiny wrist movements having a superior level of control that the elbow alone can’t offer. So even if both mechanics are moving in the same path… the wrist still adds value.

But yes, ideally if you are gonna add another mechanic, using it to help with escaping is worthwhile, especially with X-picking.

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#14

That’s actually a good point, and worth noting is that I use a crosspicking mechanic for basically everything, which theoretically can work for fast single note string stuff, but most guys who use it also have a directional pickslant they fall into for faster lines. Sounds like I have to do some woodshedding…

Thanks!

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#15

…I also cut halfway through the side of my fretting hand middle finger nail last night with an unexpectedly sharp vegetable peeler making a garnish of lemon rind for a drink last night, so now’s a GREAT time to do picking-hand-only exercises… :rofl:

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#16

The like is for eating your veggies. Egads on slicing your finger! Had a friend have to skip out on a Tonight Show appearance (ironically, juggling fire/chainsaws–on pogo stick) because of a salad making accident. Yikes!

#17

I mean, if by “veggies,” you mean “mezcal, Aperol, and ginger beer,” then yes. :rofl:

I’m gonna have to try to either super glue the nail together or put a heavy coat of clear matte nailpolish on that nail in another week or so once the underlying cut is healed, because I don’t want to wear a bandaid for the next month just to make sure the nail doesn’t catch and tear back open on something, lol.

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#18

It’s the commitment to finesse exemplified by shedding blood in the quest for a perfect twist of lemon that we admire.

#19

Many men have died in the quest for the perfect cocktail. It is known.

#20

This is gold (for me) and I can’t wait to hear/read what you’ve got to say about it in a few months.