"Building Smooth and Accurate Picking"

                              by Drew Peterson


 Yeah, yeah, another alternate picking lesson... But buying a Rusty Cooley CD 
will make you realize just how much you suck at it, and once you start 
binge-practicing, there's no turning back. Here's some stuff I've been doing 
lately that seems to help, broken down into sections based on function.


PART ONE: "Building an Even Pick Stroke"

 At the most fundamental level, in order to pick cleanly and quickly, the pick 
must be hitting the string in a rhythmically precice fashion. If you get caught
up in practicing picking patterns and drills, it's posisble to focus too much 
on getting the notes out correctly and lose focus on the rhythmic tightness 
needed for good alternate picking technique. So, this is simple. Grab your 
metronome, grab a single note on the neck, and trem pick in time to the 
metronome. Start with 16th notes at a tempo you should be able to hit 
comfortably- brisk, but within your ability. Then, just gradually work the 
tempo up to the point where you can't pick any faster without losing the 
downbeat. Over time, this maximum threshold will increase. 
 It's also important to practice trem picking notes in as many different 
registers on the guitar as possible. Especially on a 7-string, the differences 
in wrist position and angle, not to mention the string tension, between a note 
on the high E string in the middle of the neck and on the low B in the upper 
registers is pretty drastic, and one "feels" a lot different than the other. If
you only practice in a certian scale position or on, say, the G string, when 
you start moving around while playing you'll be suprised how unnatural it 
feels. 


PART TWO: "Synchronizing on a Single String" 

 This is something Rusty Cooley was stressing in his "Guest Guru" feature in 
the last Guitar Player, and his argument makes a lot of sense: before you begin
worring about picking cleanly while switching strings, it's important to have 
perfect synchronization between pickstrokes and your fingers confined to a 
single string. (The idea here in this set of "lessons," by the way, is to take 
a single technique, namely alternate trem picking, and gradually add variables 
as you go, mastering each added difficulty one step at a time). 
 So, let's start with triplets. Play the following three-note motif as triplets
at a rhythm fast enough to be challenging but still slow enough that you can 
nail it with perfect accuracy:

|-------------------------|
|-------------------------|
|-9-11-12-9-11-12-9-11-12-|
|-------------------------|
|-------------------------|
|-------------------------| etc.

 Gradually work the tempo up until you reach the point where you can't play it 
any faster with perfect accuracy. A guitarist whose name I've forgotten once 
recommended playing a lick or drill 17 times perfectly before moving up a click
on his metronome (odd, that I remember the 17 but not the name). That seems 
awfully arbitrary, but the idea's good: do, say, ten reps that are absolutely 
perfect before you speed up. If you screw up one note, start the count over. 
 Next, flip the drill backwards so you're descending. In other words, you're 
going 12-11-9 now. Because pulling off a note uses an entirely different muscle
group as hitting onto it, initially this will seem a lot harder. As frustrating
as it might seem, perservere: if you're seeing ANY kind of an imbalance here, 
it means that your technique isn't perfectly even, and that the drill is doing 
some good.
 Continue to do this using as many different groupings of notes as possible. 
Here's a few, to get you started:

|-7-9-12-|

|-7-10-12-|

|-7-8-11-|

|-7-10-11-|

 And so forth. Do them ascending and descending. 

 Next, combine the ascending and descending variants to get the muscles used to 
working in conjunction. for example, returning to the original lick;

|-9-11-12-12-11-9-9-11-12-12-11-9-| etc. 

And finally, this is a cool drill I came up with that gets all your fingers in 
on the action: Start this up fairly high on the neck, and start working it 
gradually down. Keep repeating the pattern and it'll gradually bring you into 
the lower registers. This is a great workout for your fingers:

                 4x                  4x                 4x
|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|
|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|
|-19-21-22-22-21-19-|-19-20-22-22-20-19-|18-20-22-22-20-18-|
|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|
|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|
|-------------------|-------------------|------------------|

                 4x                  4x                 4x
|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
|-18-20-21-21-20-18-|-18-19-21-21-19-18-|-17-19-21-21-19-17-|
|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------|
|-------------------|-------------------|-------------------| etc. 

The pattern keeps repeating down the neck, and along the way keeps your ear 
entertained with a cool, Satriani-esq shifting harmonic blanket. Not the kind 
of thing you could ever really bust out in a solo, but a more musical drill 
than your typical 4-note chromatics. 

 Apply the same ideas to four-note motifs. For physiological reasons, a lot of 
what you can do here will most likely be limited to chromatic lines, but if 
you've got the dexterity to do scalar drills further down on the neck, by all 
means feel free. Additionally, a variation of the drill above can be played 
with chromatics- slides will be notated marking position shifts: shift, but 
play it as two picked notes, not as a legato shift.

|-------------------------------------------------------------|
|-------------------------------------------------------------|
|-19-20-21-22-22-21-20-19\18-19-20-21-21-20-19-18\17-18-19-20-|
|-------------------------------------------------------------|
|-------------------------------------------------------------|
|-------------------------------------------------------------|

 Played this way, it moves at a much more brisk tempo down the neck, so you're 
probably going to want to reverse when you get down to the first fret and start
sliding back up. 

PART THREE: "Crossing Strings"

 This is much more straightforward: by now, you ought to be fairly comfortable 
playing along a single string. Now, we're going to distill that motion down to 
its simplest level and begin moving across strings. The easiest way to do this 
is by trem-picking scales. Start doing 16ths, 8 per note, up and down like 
this:

|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-------------------------------------------------5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-|
|-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-5-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-7-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-8-----------------| etc.

 Gradually increase the tempo as you go, keeping your movements tight and 
precice at all times. 
 Once you get up to the highest possible tempo you can do that at, back down 
again and start playing it in double time, four notes per note:

|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-----------------------------------------------------------------|
|-------------------------------------------------5-5-5-5-7-7-7-7-|
|-------------------------5-5-5-5-7-7-7-7-8-8-8-8-----------------|
|-5-5-5-5-7-7-7-7-8-8-8-8-----------------------------------------| etc.

 Now, go to two notes per note:

|-------------------------------------------------------------5-5-|
|-------------------------------------------------5-5-6-6-8-8-----|
|-------------------------------------5-5-7-7-9-9-----------------|
|-------------------------5-5-7-7-9-9-----------------------------|
|-------------5-5-7-7-8-8-----------------------------------------|
|-5-5-7-7-8-8-----------------------------------------------------| etc.

 And by this point, you should be able to rip through the scale position you've 
been working on. Just for kicks, take it another step further, though: drop 
four of the seven pitches in the scale and alternate pick arpeggio shapes:

|-------------5-8-5-------------|
|-----------5-------5-----------|
|---------5-----------5---------|
|-------7---------------7-------|
|-----7-------------------7-----|
|-5-8-----------------------8-5-| etc. 
 
 With the exception of the low and high E strings, this drill is the 
distillation of the process of shifting across strings taken to the furthest 
extreme; playing only a single note on each string. 

Running through this set of drills will smooth out any weaknesses and 
unevennesses in your picking technique and, especially if you really pay 
attention to your note articulation while playing these with a clean tone, 
drastically help your clarity. May Jimi be with you.

-Drew