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.