Guitar Picking for Beginners - Guitar Picking Techniques

Guitar picking is one of the big achievements in life. If you can sit down with your guitar and pick out some licks or show off your sweep picking your audience is going to know that you are one cool dude.

Let us take a look at some guitar picking techniques. Alternate picking is when you play a downstroke, then an upstroke, then down again. It is often mis-named alternative picking. This is a commonly used technique which just requires solid practice to develop some speed. If you can learn to play fast using alternate picking you might find that you are less impressed by guitar tapping and sweep picking as ways of impressing your audience with your guitar technique.

The way to begin practicing your alternate picking is very slowly. Do not even think about speed. The use of a metronome is also very important, and this is where your first difficulty will lie. You need to set the metronome to a very slow speed and keep to it as you practice. Most people have a belief that they can play the guitar in time without a metronome. This is just a little trick that our mind plays on us. Very few people have the ability to play in time naturally. The best thing is to assume you are one of them.

Some new guitar players have an issue with whether to begin guitar picking with an upstroke or a downstroke. When you start off learning guitar picking you generally have a natural tendency to use downstrokes. That is, your body wants to pick down all the time. It is more comfortable. Working on alternate picking gets you out of the downstroke rut and into the knack of using up and downstrokes as and when you think they sound best.

Another question that comes up for guitar picking students is where to place your right hand when you are picking. If you are playing an electric guitar, your picking sounds different when you play in different positions in relation to your pickups. The sound you get also depends on which pickups you have switched on. When you are picking on an acoustic guitar playing near the bridge sounds very different from playing over the sound hole, and you will notice variations in between. This is where your own musical creativity comes in. The guitar picker decides which sound suits which song and whether to have a thin sound coming from near the bridge or a more "booming" tone coming from near the neck.

Another guitar picking technique is known as "sweep picking" and is a fairly tricky technique to get sounding right. You are not only working on your actual guitar picking but on the cleanness of your sound and economy of motion. Basically sweep picking is a way of playing fast using arpeggios. In a way it gets you doing fast guitar picking in a short length of time but getting the knack of sweeping the pick across the arpeggios and at the same time doing the left hand fingering can be quite a challenge. If you are not sure what sweep picking is, the best way to find out is to do a search on one of the video sites and watch a guitar player actually demonstrating the technique.