alternate picking

Hi,

After seeing the free lessons I registerd and payed so I now have all access.

Well, I'm at the lesson where you learn "Jingle Bells" and the instructor is talking about alternate picking the song. I tried picking one note down and the other up and so forth, but that seems rather difficult and the note pickup up is off key. I also heard about travis picking on this site and seems te handle that but can't apply it to jingle bells.

Can anyone help?

Hi, here's my humble suggestion until an instructor picks up:
Alternate picking does take a lot of cordination practice, so it's not supposed to be a piece of cake, keep up and you'll get there. Sometimes alternate picking is interrupted when you're switching strings, so you can land on a downstroke if going downwards or the other way round. You may try that...
Unfortunately, I cannot check if there's anything out of key. If it's a note, it may be a typo, just replace it with whatever sounds good for you as the melody is quite remarkable.
Hope this helps!

I agree with SunKing1, you don't have to link everything up using alternate picking, it's all about keeping a good efficient flow. So sometimes it's probably more suitable to pick down twice in a row than alternate.

When i started out i hated alternate picking, so just constantly strummed down, which is something i definately DON'T recommend lol.

A little training exercise i do every now and again is to perform a downstroke on the 6th then pick up on the 5th then down on the 6th again then up on the 4th and then back to the 6th ... And so on down to the 1st string, then again in reverse.

Hope that helps buddy!

Hi!

Originally Posted by: remco_pnote pickup up is off key

Can you explain what you mean by this? Does the note sound out of tune?

Alternate picking is a central part of almost all guitar playing, but as Sunking1 and liambourne pointed out, sometimes it's better to pick down, down, down, or up, up, up. Usually this is when you either have a slow melody line, playing tight rhythm guitar, or change strings every note (this is what's called sweep picking, or economy picking).

But learning to alternate pick is very important, just start with the open strings and go slowly down, up, down, up, down, up with a metronome.

If you limit yourself to downstrokes you will never get past a certain speed.

Let us know how things work out!

/Ben