Even if you wouldn’t describe yourself as the “shreddy type,” we all secretly dream of our hands flying all over the neck unencumbered by technical limitations. Many people will take off, only to sputter, stall and careen into the side of a mountain.
What’s missing is an important yet often overlooked step in getting your technique off the ground: synchronizing the two hands. This might sound obvious, and it is. But very few of the people I meet actually sit down and purposefully practice this aspect of their playing, much less make it a regular enough part of their routine to keep the rust away.
We’re not just after flash or speed here, although that is fun, and also happens to be a natural byproduct of working on accuracy, time and tone production. More broadly, if we don’t have this area of our technique together, it will be nearly impossible to get quality notes out of the instrument on a consistent basis no matter what the tempo or combination of notes may be.
Thankfully, it’s not that difficult to isolate and fix synchronization issues, it just takes some attention to detail, and getting the reps in.
Even though this exercise is written as one continuous etude, try sticking with one measure at a time until you’re comfortable with it before moving on. Maintain proper fingering, practice with a metronome or drum machine, and have fun!
This lesson is an excerpt from the Technique Course that you can read all about here.
Get the Picking Together
Our first goal is to gain consistency with our alternate picking, that is: picking with consecutive down and up strokes.
Most people will find that they’re more comfortable with one direction of pick stroke over the other, usually the downstroke. The strength of your comfortable stroke, and relative weakness of the the opposing stroke will tend to create an audible dynamic accent in your alternate picking that we want to iron out.
Furthermore, since we tend to the accent strong beats in music (quarter notes in this case), and we’re trying to smooth out the accents inherent in alternate picking, we’ve divided our quarter note pulse into an odd number (3) and superimposed a binary (down/up) technique. This flips the natural accents from downstroke to upstroke every other beat.
“DOWN-up-down-UP-down-up-DOWN-up-down-UP-down-up” etc.
Practicing this way will force us to even out the dynamics and accents in our alternate picking. Our goal is to make the downstroke and upstroke sound as close to identical as possible, and any accents that occur will be a conscious musical decision on our part as opposed to a deficiency in picking technique.
Synchronizing the Fretting Hand
The next goal is to synchronize the fretting hand with the pick. We’re looking to eliminate the flams. In percussion, a flam is a rudiment that consists of a grace note followed by an accent. Think of it as the two hands hitting the instrument at slightly different times to create an embellished attack. To us guitarists a “flam” between the pick hitting the string and the fret-hand finger pressing down on the note has no chance of sounding like a clear, toneful, deliberate note. Strive for each fret-hand finger and the pick to move at precisely the same time, and to the same end.
Easier said than done.
Lastly, after you’re comfortable with the picking, producing a solid stream of of smooth sounding notes with no uncontrolled dynamic changes on either the upstroke or the down stroke, and after you can reliably fret the notes exactly when your finger comes down on the string, we can start to think about the duration of the note.
Legato Sound: Smoothing Everything Out
How long is the previous note to be held before you move onto the next note? The answer, for our purposes here, is as long as possible! We’re looking for a smooth legato sound with no discernible gaps between notes. This requires a bit of focused effort to achieve with a pick, because every time you strike a note you’re necessarily stopping and restarting the string’s vibration. The idea is to limit that “stop-and-restart” period to as little time as possible.
So, don’t let your pick rest on the string before striking it. A lot of people will “find” the string with their pick and then push it through to sound the note. This creates a gap between notes that you could drive a truck through, and produces and unappealing clacking noise from the pick as it rests on the string. Instead, let your pick swing freely, only ever coming in contact with the string as it slices through it. It might be smart take the fretting hand out of the equation while you work on this.
Now, the fretting hand can also throw a wrench in the smooth legato sound we’re after. Focus on maintaining the pressure necessary with the finger to sustain the note to the exact last moment before striking the next note.
Work on this slowly with an eye on detail. We’re not looking to develop speed with this, although that will come as you push your limits. Rather, the goal is accuracy and consistency. Focus on keeping things smooth and using no more pressure or tension that is necessary to sound good quality notes. Try this exercise on every string, and at various tempos as you become better acquainted with it.
Good luck! Check out the Technique Course for more!