Minor Pentatonic Picking Exercise (Guitar Lesson BC-185) Guitar for beginners Stage 8

Justin's Completely Free, Beginners Guitar Course Lesson BC-185.
This is Stage 8, Lesson 5.

This video gives you an exercise to help you develop your alternate picking using the minor pentatonic scale.

Find the related course notes on the following link:
http://justinguitar.com/en/BC-185-PentPickExercise.php

The Justinguitar Beginners Guitar Course, a series of over 100 lessons on guitar for beginners. Text support is on the web site and also in a proper old skool paper book which can be ordered from the web site of your local music store :)

Taught by Justin Sandercoe.

Full support at the justinguitar web site where you will find hundreds of lessons on a wide range of subjects, and all the scales and chords that you will ever need! There is a great forum too to get help, no matter what the problem.

And it is all totally free, no bull. No sample lessons, no memberships, no free ebook. Just tons of great lessons :)

To get help with this lesson (and for further info and tabs), find the Lesson ID in the video title (like ST-667 or whatever) and then look it up on the Lesson Index page of justinguitar.com

http://www.justinguitar.com

Have fun :)

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Hi, how ya doin' Justin here,

what we're gonna be checking out in
this lesson is a Minor Pentatonic picking exercise,

and I'm gonna be introducing you
to the idea of alternate picking.

Now hopefully you've been practicing
up your Minor Pentatonic Scale.

The one that sounds like this...

. . .

Hopefully you've been doing loads and
loads of practice on it,

so you can start to
now think about the picking

instead of having to think
about your fretting hand.

So, what are we gonna do with this?

Well, you probably, hopefully have just been using downpicks to play the scale so far.

If you've been using some
sort of other picking,

that might be good or it might be
bad, depending on how you're doing it.

So what I'm going to do
is give you an exercise,

to help you work on your
picking and develop this alternate style.

So what we're gonna do first of all,

we're gonna pick the Minor
Pentatonic Scale using all downpicks.

So it's, start there, the usual
place starting at the 5th fret,

. . .

And once you've done all downpicks,
you would then do all up-picks.

So up-picking every time.

. . .

Now I should mention at this point as
well for some of you speed freaks,

it's not about doing it quickly,
it's about doing it accurately.

So make sure you're not practicing a mistake.

If it's, you should be practicing at whatever
speed you can perform this at perfectly.

So if that means doing it
this speed then so be it.

Don't go, no point, no
use to anyone whatsoever,

especially you, do it slowly, get it right.

Very important. OK.

So you've done all downs,
you've done all ups.

Now you're gonna do down and
an up pick on each note.

So you're gonna go, starting with
the 1st note of the scale,

on the thickest string, you go,
down up, down up, etc.

. . .

For this one again, don't be in a
hurry, but if you want to practice it,

if you can do it accurately,

then by all means stick it to a metronome,

and start going,

. . .

Start building up the speed of it.

But really make sure that
you're doing it accurately first,

before you even think about
starting to make it faster.

So, incidentally, a good starting speed
for all of these exercises,

is doing stuff at 60, which
is going to seem incredibly slow,

but sometimes doing things
slowly is quite difficult.

So just here at 60 that's the kind of
tempo you want to be starting off with.

Really simple. That's all down strokes
and then again your upstrokes.

. . .

Then your down and ups you
might double it, so you'd have,

. . .

etc, it's important that you start slowly
when you do it with a metronome.

Remember the metronome induces
a bit of panic,

'cause it means you've gotta
keep going, you can't pause.

Which is really good, I
mean, we don't wanna stop.

We want to practice, continuing and
making things work properly.

So, your first part of the exercise
is what we just talked about.

All down, all up, then down
and up on each note.

But then I want you to have a
go at doing, if you like, proper picking.

Right, and proper picking
is alternate picking.

Which means you go down followed by
an up on the next note.

Followed by a down, up on the
next, down, up on the next.

There are other types of
picking, principally one called economy picking

which is used by kinda
heavy metal and rock guys.

All of the metal and rock guys
I know that use economy picking,

learnt how to alternate pick first.

And they have all emphasized to me,
oh, if you're trying to learn

that technique make sure
that your students

always get their alternate
picking happening first

before they're trying to
do economy picking.

So, if you've got a
friend that does economy picking,

or you've read about it or whatever
try and avoid it for now.

Get your alternate picking right first,

and then maybe have a
look at economy picking later.

So, alternate picking with
the Minor Pentatonic Scale,

we're always gonna be picking a down pick
with the note with our 1st finger.

So we're gonna be going, down, up,
down, up, down, up, down, up, etc.

. . .

...down, up, down, up, down.

As you get better at this, this is
what you want to stick to your metronome.

So, just if we do it
nicely at 60bpm, nice and slow,

we'll be doing down,up etc

. . .

And it's this alternate picking
that's a really, really, really

cool thing to get down.

'Cause most of the time
when we're playing scales,

especially as we get more
advanced and we get faster,

you need to be alternate
picking all the time.

So this is a great
little exercise, all down picks,

all up picks, down and up on
each note, and then alternate picking,

for your Minor Pentatonic Scale, that will
definitely help sort out your picking hand.

Don't forget to anchor, with
your little finger as well.

You'll probably find that helps a lot.

You don't have to, but I
think it's definitely worth starting with that.

So you can kind of decide if
that technique works for you or not.

OK. Hope you've enjoyed that, and I'll see you for some more chord work in a minute.