Lead Guitar Lesson – Economy Picking Exercises – Shred Guitar
Let´s meet our newest addition to the Guitar control team!
He is a very technical player who will help you to reach the shred zone…
Hello, this is Cameron Rasmussen with Guitar Control, today we’re going to be talking about economy picking. Economy picking, how I like to look at it, is a mix between sweep picking and alternate picking. It’s more to alternate picking in the way you’d use it in a lick.
The two licks that I’ll show you today could also be used as alternate picking exercises. But when you use economy picking, it is a way that you can play something much faster than you can with alternate picking because you can keep your right hand much more relaxed and you can play the same lick as you would with alternate picking with less motion.
So if you’re having trouble playing any lick with alternate picking, a good
place to go to is your economy picking as long as you’ve had them both practiced up.
Economy picking is — why I said it’s a mix between sweeping and alternate picking is because what you’re doing is you’re basically alternate picking, but you’re kind of doing a half sweep to the next string. For an example of what I’m talking about, playing that A minor scale up to the 5th, that was with alternate picking. But I’ll do it with economy picking and what that is, is down stroke first, upstroke, down stroke and then another down stroke to the next string and then upstroke again, starting the pattern over and over again as you move up the strings. Now it requires less motion because instead of hitting the next string with an upstroke you’re hitting with a down stroke which requires you don’t have to change direction with your right hand.
The first lick I’m going to show you today is a hexatonic A minor shape, ascending in three octaves, and I’m going to do it ascending and descending using economy picking.
The next lick I’m going to show you is almost the same thing in A minor, but it’s not a hexatonic. It’s going to be a regular ascending scale, but we’re going to the same pattern in two octaves and it’s going to require some change of direction in our right hand, making it a little bit harder, which is a good exercise to develop your economy picking. Here we go. I’ll play it again.
So there are two exercises that are really good for practicing your economy picking and it’s not so far off from alternate picking, but it is a good new twist on a different way to use your picking hand and it’s a good tool to have if you need to use it.
So guys, for the tab examples for this video I’m also going to include the direction your pick should be going for each note so there’s no confusion. This has been a good lesson in economy picking. I enjoyed showing you
guys. I hope you got a lot out of it. Make sure to subscribe on our You Tube Channel and we’ll see you in our next video lessons, thanks for watching.
