Alternate Picking Exercises

You probably wonder what NE->SW means? Well, it's North East to South West - may sound funny but it's the best way to describe it! I would like to mention one thing you will sure meet in some of my lessons - and that is DRAWING. I like to call it drawing because when I work on exercises I usually get bored if I just play a scale up and down, so I try to approach the creation of exercises the way I would approach drawing a picture. Before you start drawing you always think of what to draw, right? Well, here I make it a bit more simple and simply pick the direction I want to move, or imagine some shape I want to draw on my fretboard. It really helps if you are stuck with creation. So here we have 6th string representing North, 1st string representing South, headstock representing East and bridge representing West. Pretty simple and effective. This exercise is here to force you to relax while shredding - it's really important. A lot of players dig their hand in and grab the neck with the thumb firmly and that's what you should never do. You should be totally free to go anywhere you want over the fretboard in a second and being relaxed is one of the keys to it. Once you feel you can do this exercise easily (doesn't have to be at my speed, you can always work on several exercises to make practice sessions more interesting) move to the next lesson and see the SE->NW approach. See you later!