The Picking Exercise That Doesn’t Sound Like a Drill

Here’s a practice exercise that’s great for your alternate picking, and really good for your fretting hand too.

Most picking drills are mind numbing; I’m talkin’ spider crawls, chromatic runs up and down four frets, the same four notes for twenty minutes, etc. They technically work, but nobody keeps doing them, and if you’re just going to quit doing it, you’re not going to benefit long term.

In our opinion, this is an exercise you’ll keep playing because it sounds like music.

What you’re playing

The exercise outlines a run of chords:

A minor, D minor, G major, C major, F major, B diminished, and then back to A.

It’s important to know that you’re not strumming those, you’re arpeggiating each one. You’re picking through the notes one at a time, three notes per chord, and then moving to the next.

Those seven chords should look familiar if you’ve done any theory with us (more to come). That’s every chord in the key of C major, in order, starting from the sixth.

Why it moves this way

This is a very classically inspired exercise; which means things move in fifths and fourths.

From A to D is a fifth. From D down to G is a fourth. Then another fifth, another fourth, and so on down the line.

The diminished one sits a little outside that pattern, but it’s a very classical way to get back to a major key from there.

You don’t need to understand any of that to get the benefit, it’s just why it sounds the way it does instead of sounding like an exercise.

That root motion (down a fifth and up a fourth over and over) is the single most common chord movement in Western music. Once your ear knows the sound of it, you’ll hear it in jazz standards, in Pachelbel, in half the pop songs on the radio, etc. So you’re training your picking hand and your ear at the same time.

Why it works on your picking hand

Because you’re arpeggiating each chord, you’re playing groups of four notes at a time: one, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.

That grouping is what makes your alternate picking hand pay attention: down, up, down, up, straight through with no resets.

The thing that makes this harder than a scale run is that the group boundary and the chord change happen at the same time. Your left hand has to move to a new shape at the exact moment your right hand is mid-pattern. This is the skill that tends to fall apart in real playing, so that’s what we’re working on here.

With this one, it’s strict alternate picking all the way through. Remember, no cheating with a downstroke when you cross to a new string because it feels easier. That’s what we’re training against!

Why I like exercises like this

I like this exercise so much more than the non-musical stuff.

This is something you’ll actually use in your playing, and it sounds good. And if it sounds good, it means you’re going to play it.

So I always try to come up with diatonic exercises like this, where it’s musical and it sounds good to your ear, but it’s also incredibly beneficial for something specific.

There’s a second benefit, too. By the time you’ve run this a few hundred times, you know the diatonic chords of C major in your hands and not just on paper. You’ll be improvising one day and your fingers will land on the right chord tone without you deciding to.

How to practice it

Take your time with this one.

• Start slow. 60 beats per minute, or 80 if that feels too crawling.
• Use a metronome. We have a free one here if you need it.
• Work up in increments of about 5 bpm
• Target anywhere from 130, or up to 150 if you really want to be flying

Don’t jump the tempo; remember the whole point is the picking hand staying clean through the changes, and that falls apart when you outrun it.

If you make the same mistake twice in a row at a tempo, you’re at least 10 bpm too fast, so drop it, clean it up, and come back.

Check your right hand before you start

Since the whole point of this is the picking hand, it’s worth two minutes on what it should be doing.

Motion comes from the wrist, not the elbow and not the fingers

If your forearm is swinging, you’ll top out on speed and your arm will get tired. If only your fingers are moving, you’ll have no power. It’s a small rotational motion from the wrist, and it should feel pretty lazy.

Keep the pick close to the strings

The biggest thing separating fast players from slow ones is travel distance. If your pick is coming three inches off the string on every stroke, you’re doing three inches of unnecessary work sixteen times a bar. So try to get it down to almost nothing.

Angle the pick slightly

When it’s flat on, the pick hits the string with its whole edge and it’ll fight ya. Instead, if it’s tilted a few degrees, it slices through. You don’t need much, you just need enough that it isn’t perfectly parallel.

Grip loosely

A death grip on the pick transfers every bit of tension into your forearm, so hold it firmly enough that it doesn’t move and no firmer.

None of that is specific to this exercise, but this exercise will expose whichever of those you’re getting wrong, because the string crossings punish wasted motion.

What “it gets easier” looks like

People want to know how long this takes.. Well..

Week one, you’ll be at 60 or 70 bpm and it’ll feel clumsy at the chord changes. That’s normal and it is not a sign you’re bad at guitar.

By the end of week two, if you’re doing five focused minutes a day, you’ll be somewhere around 90 and the changes will become easier.

Getting from 100 to 130 takes longer than getting from 60 to 100, and that’s just how it goes. The last stretch is where most of the technique comes through fully.

And somewhere in there you’ll notice you’ve stopped thinking about the chords and started listening to them instead.

Common mistakes

• Speeding up through the easy chords and slowing down at the changes: This is very common and hard to hear in yourself. So, record it once and you’ll catch it almost immediately.
• Breaking alternate picking at string crossings: The crossings are the lesson here.
• Letting notes ring into each other: Each note should sound on its own. If it’s blurring, your fretting hand isn’t lifting.
• Skipping the B diminished because it feels weird: It’s supposed to feel weird. It’s also the chord that makes the resolution back to A land.
• Practicing it once through and calling it done: This is a five minute a day thing. Don’t quit doing it after one day.

How this connects to everything else

Those seven chords you’re arpeggiating are the diatonic chords of the key. That’s the same thing we cover when we talk about finding every chord in a key by skipping notes in the scale.

Each chord you’re arpeggiating is a triad: root, third, fifth, picked one at a time. So every time you run this, you’re rehearsing the chord tones you’d want to target when you’re soloing over a progression.

And because you’re moving through the whole key in one direction, you’re also getting a feel for how the chords relate to each other like which ones feel like home, which ones feel like tension, and which refuse to sit.

So if you’ve been working on triads, or on chord tone targeting, or on the CAGED shapes, this is the exercise that ties them together and puts them under a metronome.

That’s why I keep coming back to it.

Where to take it next

Once this is comfortable, there are three easy ways to extend it without learning anything new.

First, try to move it to another key. The shapes and the movement stay identical, you just start somewhere else.

Then reverse it. Run the progression backwards, A, B diminished, F, C, G, D minor, A minor. It feels completely different under the hand.

And finally, change the direction of the arpeggio. Instead of picking each chord low to high every time, alternate: up on one chord, down on the next.

Five minutes a day

Five minutes a day beats forty minutes on Sunday. We all know that technique is built by repetition spread over time, not by one long session.

So put it at the front of your practice. This is when your hand is fresh, so you’ll play it cleanly, and you’ll be warmed up for everything else.

Then leave it alone until tomorrow.

Start slow this week and let it get fast each time you do it.