Guitar Technique: Pro Exercises To Master The Guitar

1. Course Introduction: Hi. I'm Jamie Ellis, and welcome to my Skillshare course on Precision Picking for guitar. I'm a professional guitar player, and in that time, I've toured across the globe, played with named artists, and working with some of the country's best studios. Now in this course, we're going to start right at the beginning. We're going to cover hand positioning and some basic finger exercises to really improve on your dexterity and finger independence. We're then going to look at different picking techniques, such as alternate picking, hybrid picking, economy picking, and more. We're going to look at how to actually approach these techniques and then how to apply them to your play. I'll break everything down into a nice and easy to follow step by step guide so I can guide you along your journey. Don't worry if you get stuck. You can always go back and rewatch some of the videos until you master these exercises. I've also included diagrams and support and resources to really guide you through this journey. Now, come to the end of this course, you're going to have the confidence and the know how to really play guitar like a true master. So grab your guitar in your favorite pick, let's dive into Lesson blood. 2. Posture and Basic Picking Practice: Now. Posture and holding the guitar. Sit it comfortably on your lap, and you want a nice straight back. Don't slouch. It's gonna cause yourself problems, lay it down the line. Fretting hand placement, you want to think about keeping your hand there like a crab claw. We're going to push on the back of the neck with our thumb, not this section of our hand here. Real quickly, if you grab your picking hand, and you squeeze your hand, just like so, use this part of your thumb. Squeeze. You can't grip very tight. Change that grip now, introduce that thumb. You can press a lot harder. And that's going to help us down the line. We're getting better note placement. So I'm going to grip my guitar like so. On the back of the guitar, my thumb sits in the middle of the neck. It gives me a nice rounded support. My wrist underneath the neck, it allows me to stretch as well. For my thumbs up here, I'm limiting my stretch, the reach of my fingers. It's going to cause us problems. And again, we're gonna be pushing from there, which is going to cause us a few pains in the wrist. So a nice nice grip on the guitar like so. Wrist underneath. Terms of the pick, you want as minimal of the pick showing as possible and this can feel a little weird at first. You'll get used to it, and you'll find your own way of using the pick and you'll find what's most comfortable for you. I like to hold my pick a little bit like a pencil. So I place it in between my thumb and my forefinger and I hold it almost sort of 90 degrees to where my finger sits, like so. To get started, we're going to use a nice, easy beginner exercise just to get our hands talking to each other. It's really important. We need both hands coordinated before we start moving on to the advanced stuff. So a nice easy exercise. We're gonna number our fingers, one, two, three, and four, and each finger is going to be assigned to a fret. So frets are one, two, three, four, and so on. And we've got dots on top to help us. We've got dots on my guitar on fret three, fret five, fret seven, fret nine, and we've got two dots indicating fret 12. Now, for this exercise, we're going to start on the low E string. You're gonna place your first finger on fret one, remembering to keep that thumb on the middle or the back of the neck to get a nice grip. Fret one, and to pick that low Eastring for me. Like so. We're then go to introduce our middle finger finger two, and that's gonna go onto fret two. Next, move it onto fret three with our third finger, and then finally onto fret four with our pinky. So that will give you one, two, three, four, like so. You're then gonna repeat this step for the other six strings. Like so. Notice my fingers are in the middle of these fret wires here. We've got no buzz. We've got a nice clean sound. If you are facing buzz like s, adjust your finger, adjust your grip. You're either too close to that fret wire or you're simply just not pressing hard enough. Don't press too hard, though. You don't want to hurt yourself. Picks, nice light down picks. We don't want to beat the guitar up like so. Nice gentle. Slightly slow at a comfortable speed and slowly increase the speed, just to get your hands talking together. Once you've done that, let's try going backwards. I'd use this as a nice, easy warm up exercise just to get our hands talking to each other every time we pick up the guitar. And we're going to progressively make that exercise harder to introduce new techniques as we. 3. Develop Finger Indiependence: Introduce some finger independence exercises for your fretting hand. We're going to use the same picking techniques that we've talked about already in this video, but we're going to change up the one, two, three, four exercise that we've previously talked about. Down below, there's going to be a PDF with loads of different combinations of these exercises you can try. We're going to do a couple now. You can practice along with me, and then I'll let you guys practice them on your own with the metronome using your little gym reps. Previously, we've been simply playing one, two, three, four on your frets. We're now going to change the order of fingers. We're gonna go one, three, two, four. One, three, two, four. And then backwards, four, two, three, one. When you start this exercise, keep it pick into just downstrokes. Focus on the exercise itself. Once you're comfortable with your fretting hand, then introduce your alternate picking and your faster speeds with your metronome. And so on. Other finger combinations we can use is one, four, two, three. We can do three, two, four, one. The combinations are literally endless. As I said, we've got PDF down below with loads of different examples and see if you can come up with your own. 4. Introduction To Alternate Picking: Let's expand on our basic picking exercise to start introducing some dexterity into our fingers, and we can also talk about a few different picking techniques, just to start level everything up. So we've already started with a simple one, two, three, four on each string. And so far, we're only using downstrokes. The next step would be to play this using upstrokes, just to strengthen that upstroke of the pick. Up picks are often a weaker picking technique due to just the lack of momentum and the lack of use, really from beginning guitar players. So we're going to spend a little bit of time on that because we want both our down and our upstrokes to have a nice equal volume. Same exercise before, one, two, three, four, with our threat in hand, and we're just going to use upstrokes instead. Once you're comfortable with your upstrokes, we're going to start introducing alternate picking. Now, this is going to be used in the more advanced techniques for introducing speed into our playing, especially with more solos and lead lines and those sorts of things. So alternate picking is simply just as it says on the tin, down up, down, up, down up picking. So we're gonna try this starting off with just one note individually. So we're gonna go down, up, down, up. Oh. Master this going down and up the neck until you feel comfortable. Both your down and upstrokes are at equal volume, and fret and your picking hand is nice and comfortable. As we talked about before, remember, you want as minimal the pick showing as possible, and it wants to poke out about 90 degrees from your thumb. I also find, especially as you get into faster picking techniques that I like to use my pinky finger as a little anchor. I sometimes rest this here on the fretboard. Sometimes see guitar players on hits Scrum and all that stuff. They get in these funny shapes and they're waiting their hands around and all this, there's a lot of tension in this hand. Totally ridiculous. Don't worry about it. You're a nice relaxed hand. Speed comes from being relaxed. Keep your hands relaxed and comfortable at all times, and the speed will come with the practice of technique. 5. Develop Alternate Picking: We've got alternate picking loosely under our fingers. Let's ramp up the speed slightly. I now want to put four picks per note. So I'm going to go down, up, down, up, down, up, down, down. And so on. Try this with a metronome, and it's this metronome work that's really going to make a difference to your playing. Although it's not the most entertaining a practice, it's crucial to the development of your pick and hand. Sit at a nice, slow and comfortable temper. Click, click, click, click, click, click, click, click. Click. Once you're comfortable at that speed, increase only by increments of five BPM. Continue with the metronome until you start to see the speed increase in your pick and hand. You're also going to find you're going to come more comfortable with the pick and with your fretting hand as the two start working together simultaneously. Use these exercises as your very own guitar gym. If you'd attend a normal gym, you wouldn't start lifting the big weights from day one. You start with the lighter weights and build up in increasing reps. These exercises are exactly that for your guitar playing. Start slow with your metronome and build up in increments of five, like we talked about. You're not going to see instant gratification, but you are going to get gradual compounding improvement on your playing. 6. Introduction To Economy Picking: I've mastered alternate picking, economy picking took my playing even further. As it says in the name, it's more economical. To make this work, we want to use a three note per string scale like so. So there I've just taken our normal A natural minus scale and turn it into a three note per string scale. Now, economy picking focuses on pick direction. As I move down the fretboard, I want to make sure my pick is moving in that sort of downwards motion with my fingers. It's more efficient. I'm moving in that direction. But where I come back on myself, I want to make sure I'm more in up pick motion, just to allow that for more fluidity in my fingers. So when I pick this three note per scale pattern, I'm going to pick Down, up, down, down, up, down. And as you'll see, my pick then slowly sort of glides in that same direction as my fingers. Down, up, down, down, up, down. Down, down, down. Now, coming back on myself, I'm going to start with an up pick. D, dot dot. Now, this can be a little challenging at first, especially if you're really familiar with alternate picking. So take some time with this, start slow with your metronome and slowly increase your temper. 7. Introduction To Hybrid Picking: Hybrid picking is another great way that we can embellish our cord progressions. And as it says on the tin, it's a hybrid of both using our fingers and our pick. It's often a great way to really embellish the start of our cord, or it's how I use it anyway. If we take our normal chord progressions, C A minor F, and G. I'm just going to hybrid pick through this just to embellish it slightly. As you can see, it's a really nice, beautiful way of embellishing our chord progression. Now, what we've got down below is a little tab for you, using the same progression, and you're going to play along with me just to get the idea under our fingers, you know? I usually use my middle finger with the pick, but you can also use your ring finger just if you want an extra little bit of embellishment. So what we're going to do is we're going to hybrid pick mainly the first and the fifth degree or the first and the oxave of each chord. So I'm picking here with my picks on the A string, and my middle finger is going to grab that B string. We're going to pick those two notes together. I'm gonna pick through the cord and I peiate it just like so, using a mix of the pick and a fingers. Now, if I pick that exact same pattern with just a pick, It sounds similar though. But there's subtle little details in the hybrid picking that really help make it sound a little bit prettier. I also allows you to pick through and pegate the cord a little bit faster, and as some small little details like that. Give it a go. Try the tap an below. 8. Develop Picking Efficiency: You move to more complicated alternate picking patterns, it's really important to take notice of your pick in hand. You want your movements to be as minimal as possible to improve efficiency. Now, if I take this little pattern here I could economy pick it up down, up, up, down, up, down, up. Doesn't quite make sense. I can alternate pick it. And you'll notice my pick is going to sit almost between the G and the B string there. I'm not going to sort of move around too much. I'm going to try and lock it between the two strings to maximize my efficiency at picking those. When picking at speed, I'm almost just rotating the pick rather than making huge wrist movements like so. You notice, it comes more from my thumb and my finger movement than an actual wrist sort of strum like so.