Essential Strum Technique: Alternating Picking
Lesson #379 • Jul 24, 2021
Video lesson
Instructional PDF 2 pages
Editor’s notes
Hey friends! New lesson today on alternate picking - an essential strumming technique which is invaluable to have in your toolkit. I’ll briefly explain the technique, and then walk you step-by-step through an example riff to help you get introduced with the continuous up & down strums, whether strumming or playing bass-line notes. Finally, I’ll show you how you can practice this technique over a backing track I created just for this lesson.
Video timestamps:
- 0:00 Preview & Alternate Picking 101
- 4:41 Figure 1: Bass Notes Only
- 7:05 Figure 2: Strumming Only
- 8:24 Figure 3: Combining Bass + Strumming
- 9:48 Misc Tips & Advice
- 11:56 Backing Track! Playing Along & Improv
Backing track for this lesson
Here’s the backing track I made to accompany this lesson. It repeats one measure each of G-Am-C-D, played at 110bpm. You can also practice your G-major scale improvisation along with this backing track, as I demonstrate in the video above.
Audio Version of Backing Track
Here’s an audio (mp3) version of the same track, which you can use to practice. You can also download the file and save it for off-line use.
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