The first guitar instructional video I ever bought was Paul Gilbert’s Intense Rock 1. I must admit when I watched it I was amazed at how fast and clean his alternate picking was. So I started to practice the licks from video diligently every day.
After a few months of doing this, I got totally sick of practising the same licks over and over. What I then did was compose some variations to help make things more interesting for myself. One of the variations in particular I found incredibly helpful for my technique. So I thought I’d share it with you in this lesson. I hope it helps you as much as it helped me. 🙂
Let’s take a look at it…
Rock Guitar Lick 8: Paul Gilbert Style Alternate Picking Lick
This lick uses the E Natural Minor scale, and uses strict alternate picking throughout. One of the cool things about this lick is that it helps you to develop both your outside-picking and inside- picking. Just in case you haven’t heard these terms before, let’s quickly talk about them now. To help make it easier for me to explain them to you, let’s check out the TAB again…
In this guitar lick there are three places where you need to change strings. If you look at the first two shown with the yellow boxes, you’ll notice that you are doing the following…
- Doing a downstroke on the D-string.
- Doing an upstroke on the G-string.
- Doing a downstroke on the D-string.
This type of string crossing movement is called outside-picking. This is because the pick is moving on the outside of the two strings.
If you now check out the blue box on the TAB, you can see that you need to do the following…
- Do an upstroke on the D-string.
- Do a downstroke on the G-string.
- Do an upstroke on the D-string.
Because the pick is now moving inside the two strings, then this type of string crossing is called inside picking.
Have fun!
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