Speed Picking Techniques for Heavy Metal Guitar

Speed Picking Techniques for Heavy Metal Guitar
Hi my name is Gary Schutt and we’re talking metal guitar, right now we’re going to talk a little about shredding and speed picking. One thing you can do to help you work on your right hand speed picking and accuracy, once you have learned how to hold your pick properly, hopefully you’re at that stage now or else, you’re going to be clueless. Rest your wrist lightly on the bridge, your arm should be up on the curve of the body and we’re going to be using a C note 5th fret G string for this exercise, we’re going to exercise on one string for now. We’re going to start with slow even strokes, down – up – down – up. With as little motion as possible, you don’t want to be doing this; you can’t get very fast and accurate doing that. So the less motion, the closer to your body, the better. Start nice and slow, try to control your movement as best as possible. And you want to hear the note ring evenly on the down stroke and the up stroke, nice steady consistent time. And then gradually get faster, making the notes even, consistent, that’s in volume and attack. If you should reach a point at this stage where it’s getting sloppy or uneven, slow down, back it up a couple steps, until you have that even and try to get faster again. Go a little faster. Consistency, evenness control and then slow down. This next exercise will help if you have a metronome or help you keep time, you can put on a song and as long as it’s the same tempo through out the whole song, you can use that as a time keeper. We’re going to listen to our metronome, which is going to keep time for us and we’re going to play the same note, down – up – down – up, alternating strokes, quarter notes. Do that about 8 times, and do 8th notes which is double the time of that, and then we’re going to do 16th notes which is double the 8th note and quadruped the quarter note. So for every beat you’re going to do 4 notes. And do about a measure of two of each, so we’ll be doing this. 1-2-3-4. Next exercise, takes that one step further by doing quarter note, quarter note triplet, 8th note, 8th note triplet, 16th note, 16th note triplet. 1-2-3-4.