Curious if anyone has any experience of “unlearning” economy picking, or rather learning to strict alternate pick. I know it’s not necessary to strict alternate pick everything, but I’ve noticed with learning some solos or riffs that depend heavily on strict alternate picking that they don’t sound right and the time feel gets skewed.
The issue I’ve identified is that as I’ve learned my scales and worked my alternate picking, I’ve unconsciously learned to economy pick. When I got down a string, if the last stroke was a down stroke, I’ll repeat another down. Same with coming upwards and upstrokes. This also creates a weaker sound it seems.
Anyone have direct experience and ideally, exercises that are musical and/or not totally monotonous that can help to unlearn economy and ingrain strict alt picking? I haven’t seen anything in Justins courses about this, but if it exists I’d love to review them. Thanks!
I find strict alternate picking unrealistic. Also, kinda unnecessary
But I do it, just as an exercise/warm-up. Playing anything. Pat Martino’s lines, arpeggios… Julian Lage’s Etude No 1 is a real fun, if you can find it. People play Bach using alternate picking…
I agree with ^^^^^^^^^^ Don’t try to unlearn anything at all, just carry on as you are. I do a bit of alternate picking as a warm up but don’t habitually stick to it, economy picking is the better way of going forward, it helps you to avoid getting too tired and helps avoid injury.
Sounds like you’ve replaced the ‘outside’ alternate picking motion, with economy/ directional picking. All good, and generally makes sense, as long as it works for you. Can depend on the context though, and you’ve mentioned it can sometimes feel ‘weak’.
As some have already mentioned, its often a combination of alt/ economy/ directional etc; particularly when you add in slides, legato, bends etc.
I tend to film myself alot, and its often that I dont know exactly what I did until I look at the footage.
To practice outside alternate picking, you can try alot of 3 note per string/ 2 note per string alternating musical exercises that’ll force that outside alt picking movement. @Alexeyd mentioned Bach. I’ve found similar baroque pieces that contain helpful musical patterns for alt picking also.
So may option options, as stated by others.
