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You’ve probably heard of economy picking, which is where you use one continuous pick motion to cross strings—instead of using alternate picking.
You’ve probably heard of economy picking, which is where you use one continuous pick motion to cross strings—instead of using alternate picking.
For example, if you started on a downstroke and played three notes on the A string, your pick will end on a downstroke for the third note. If you fret the next note on the D string, you can use that same downward motion of the pick and pick the A string. The key is to make this one sweeping movement.
If you’re already familiar with the idea of using a rest stroke, you’ll know that as you pick through the A string, the pick comes to rest against the D string. As you fret the note on the D string of our hypothetical lick, you just push that pick right on through the D string as well, catching that note.
If you play more than one note on the same string, you revert to alternate picking—but you’ll always use a sweep for the string changes. However, using economy picking doesn’t mean you have to be picking all the notes in a lick.
Taking economy picking at its most minimalist form, you can just sweep the string crossing and let the fingers do the rest with hammers and pulls, as you’ll see in LICK 1. This is a repeating sextuplet that is nearly always used as a picking exercise. To add a slightly more aggressive feel, you can add a few more picked notes.
LICK 2 shows how I pick the first four notes only, leaving the remaining notes as hammer-ons. Note how the picking automatically reverts to alternate