Tips & Techniques
Essential Strum Technique: Alternating Picking
Lesson #379
Video lesson
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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.
Downloads of this backing track’s MP3 audio file, as well as the Garage Band project files (for iOS and the Mac) are available to my Patreon supporters. Learn more about supporting me on Patreon.
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