Transcripts
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.