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