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.