Originally Posted by: chrisweyersDespite the common misconception, alternate picking is not the best picking technique out there. And it's actually quite inefficient at times.

I don't fully agree with that. I believe that alternate picking is the base that every guitarist should have before moving on to more advanced picking techniques like legato and sweep/economic picking. All great guitarists have mastered alternate picking - it's a crucial starting point and sound really nice and pronounced when combined with legato techniques.

There's a couple of great alternate picking exercises on the web that I've used before joining guitartricks, but it all boils down to the same thing.

#1: Metronome, start off really slow and accurate. It's much easier and actually LESS time consuming to start off this way than to pick up bad habits and try and correct it later on.
#2: 3 - 4 notes per string, up down up down etc, moving on to the following string every time.
#3: Applying the same exercises with string skipping or using 1 string at a time, ascending and descending.

Ex.

1|--------------------12342345---------------------
2|----------------1234--------2345-----------------
3|------------1234----------------2345-------------
4|--------1234------------------------2345---------
5|----1234--------------------------------2345-----
6|1234----------------------------------------2345- etc
udud

There should be a host of other alternate picking exercises on here, but this is the basic one we all started off with.

Hope this helps