E Minor Double Picking Study 1

In this guitar lesson we’ll be looking at a great way of improving your alternate picking technique. To do this, we’re going to go through an eight bar study that uses double picking.

What Is Double Picking?

When you alternate pick, you’ll often play a different fretted note for each pick stroke. So if you play a sequence of notes, you are going to be changing the note being fretted every time you pick a new note.

Here’s an example lick showing this…

Example Lick 1: No Double Picking

Lick 1: Played at 60 BPM

Lick 1: Played at 120 BPM

Now let’s take a look at the same lick, but this time using double picking…

Example Lick 2: With Double Picking

Lick 2: Played at 60 BPM

Lick 2: Played at 120 BPM

The key thing to notice is that we’re now picking each fretted note twice. This means that the picking hand is having to play at twice the speed of the fretting hand. This is not only fun to do, I think that it also sounds pretty cool. 🙂

The Study

Now that we’ve talked a little bit about double picking, let’s now take a look at the study.

If you look at the TAB of the study below for a couple of minutes, you might notice a few things…

It’s in the key of E minor, and uses the E Harmonic Minor scale.
It’s built around an eight bar chord progression.
It mainly uses notes from three different arpeggios (Em, Am and B). Although I do sneak in some non-arpeggio notes in various places to make it sound more interesting.
The bulk of the notes of the study are played using sixteenth note timing. This means that you’ll need to play these notes using four evenly-spaced notes per beat.