The key to picking fast is just in your undestanding of rhythm. When you know what you are doing then speed comes naturally. There is nothing physical preventing you from shredding right now, you just don't know what notes to play. You don't need stronger arm muscles and if you hand hurts it is probably because you are doing something wrong.

As such this guide is really about understanding rhythm and holding your pick correctly.

Rhythm is more important to music than melody. If you play random notes in time you will still seem like you know what you are doing (modern jazz?). If you play a proper melody out of time it will sound like a cat fight (although some may prefer this to modern jazz).

Hold the pick extending from the first knuckle.


The first time you try to play like this you might think it feels awkward, like you don't have control over the placement that well and you're clubbing at the strings like you have flippers for hands. But it is also like learning a bicycle, a small initial hurdle that nobody really remembers years later.

Unituitively, that feeling of no fine control is actually exactly what you want, because that lack of 'fine control' is actually your inability to use your finger muscles to reposition the pick. Your finger muscles are weak and relying on them is why your hand gets cramped. Tension on your tendons as you move your wrist can also lead to damage. This picking position forces you to give up on using your finger muscles.

It's also possible you have been doing something similar the entire time. If so keep doing what you were doing. The key is that your large thumb muscle should be doing all the work to hold the pick, not your tiny finger muscles or carpal-tunnel connected forearm muscles.

There are some other benefits to this position as well:

• Every string is picked in the same way, which dramatically simplifies learning to play a riff across different strings, or learning to reliably play across strings
  
• Palm muting becomes easier, especially palm muting on smaller strings, as they are all played the same and the palm can naturally rest on the strings or bridge and you can control muting easily by just moving your hand forward or back.
  
• Your brain tends to tense up muscles you are using when you are concentrating, which happens a lot when learning things. Because no finger muscles are used, you should immediately notice that your no longer need a death grip on your pick.

You will ultimately come to holding your pick in your own way, but it should be inspired by the best aspects of this grip after you have given it an honest try.

Your wrist does the picking up and down, and you position your hand via moving your arm slightly.

Your wrist never stops moving up and down to the beat, no matter what notes are actually being picked. This helps your rhythm.

Here's an example of the intro riff to the trooper, just the picking hand.

As you can see, the rhythm of the song is different than my wrist movement, and it looks like it is super easy to play, because it is super easy to play. The picking hand is a time keeper. The extra rhythmic qualities in the riff come from not playing a note for every wrist movement and via legato (hammer-ons/pull-offs).

The idea is simple, play up strokes on all off beats, and down strokes on all down beats.

A down beat is what you would tap your foot to when listening to music. So if you can tap your foot to it, then you have found the down beats.

A down beat is usually a quarter note. When a time signature is in 4/4 it means there are four quarter notes in a measure. If you just count the beats, you would say 'One Two Three Four'.

One beat of time may then be divided into additional fractions. If there is one note between the beat this is an 8th note, and you would count 'One and Two and Three and Four and'.

Next time you are in session mode, try playing these patterns, and always play with a down stroke on the numbers, and an up stroke on the &'s.


This is a pretty simple set of patterns, but you should be able to tell pretty quickly that each has a powerful difference on how it feels. Missing the '3' sounds very latin, while missing the first '&' feels kind of metal.

• Count out loud. Do not read along in your head, there will never be a point where you are good enough to stop counting out loud when learning new rhythms. I guarantee you if Steve Vai somehow found an entirely new rhythm he had trouble with he would count it out to learn it.
  
• Tap your foot. In general, If you cannot play something while tapping your foot, you cannot play it. Slow it down as far as you have to where you can tap your foot on down beats while playing the section. It may seem hard when you are learning something new because you lack the mental capacity to coordinate yet another limb, but this should be a milestone you work towards for everything you play. When using riff repeater try setting difficulty to 100% and speed to 25% and work your way up from there.
  
• Sleep is good. The mental re-wiring necessary to understand rhythm better happens when you are asleep. So trying to improve in one 8 hour practice session is not going to be as effective as sleeping on a few smaller insights. This is the whole reason that the 60 day challenge exists, because 60 consecutive sleep cycles can have a huge impact on your brain.
  
• Count as you walk/run. Whenever you are walking around and keeping a steady pace, try making up random rhythms and counting them using your pace as the metronome.

I have encountered people trying to learn to play instruments who think that counting music or any musical theory somehow removes emotion from playing, but this is misguided, and these people always have terrible rhythm. Counting lets you more quickly assimilate feeling, and makes the mental associations stronger as a result. Every rhythmic quality has a very specific feeling to it, and your goal is to know these inside and out, so when you hear a pattern, you feel the missing first & and missing 3 in your gut and you know exactly how to reproduce it. In a way, Rocksmith's lack of timing information forces you to build these skills in ways that reading music skips.

The benefits of tapping your foot or otherwise trying to feel the rhythm while playing can be measured in Rocksmith. Just try a score attack on your favorite song with and without this and see how your final score improves.

If there are four notes between the beats, this is counted:


When alternate picking 16th notes, you play down strokes on all the downstrokes on the One Two Three Four and 'and' notes, and up strokes on the ea's.

It's very important to speak this out loud when first playing to try and get these mental associations down.

You might wonder "What's the difference between 16th notes and 8th notes played twice as fast?". The answer is that it is still based around where you tap your foot to the music. If you tap every 4 notes, then you are playing 16th notes. The feel of picked 16th notes is the feel of shredding, where fast 8th notes is more punk.

A simple 'galloping' pattern found in Iron Maiden and Metallica and others could be transcribed as:


If the riff is mostly eighth notes, but there are picked some sixteenth notes sprinkled in, you should still try to play it by 16th note rules.


A great example is the gallop picking riff in Iron Maiden's The Trooper. It starts with the really fast eighth note D G D E power chord riff and then goes into a sixteenth note gallop picking on the E chord w/ open low e string.

The rhythm there is:


The way I play that riff is like so:


If you find the initial D G D E chord change harder to play than the gallop parts, it is all in your head. Physically your right hand does less work during that initial transition, so it should be easier right? The difficulty is just mental and means you need to slow things down until that mental blockage goes away.

Many songs incorporate 16th notes as hammer on's or pull off's only.

This works perfectly naturally with strict alternate picking, so well that it becomes very obvious why they are played like this in the first place: It lets you keep picking your 8th notes normally and just throw in some flair here and there.

There is nothing special you need to do, just pick exactly like you do normally with 8th notes, and hammer on pull of transitions between notes. Focus on picking consistently to hit the 8th notes on time so your hammer on/pull offs will be forced into time.

This is the easiest way to make your solos sound impressive for free, the best way to practice this is just in session mode, or a legato-heavy band like iron maiden.

If you have a song with triplets, this is usally counted like:


Triplets have a strong feel of falling forward, so strong it may be hard to switch back and forth between triplet feel and 'straight' 8th/16th note feel at first.

When picking triplets with an up/down pattern you will naturally alternate between down and up strokes on the down beat. When combined with 'even' note divisions you can have a pattern that seems to fight against any way to pick it. Each triplet pattern needs to be decoded individually based on the tempo and speed of the song.

But almost always, the guitarists who wrote these licks were using alternate picking to play them, so discovering how to pick them is just a little puzzle.


Discovering your own way of handling triplets is a part of developing your play style, I would play this riff like:

Sweep picking comes up a lot when discussing economy picking, so I think it's important to clear up some confusion, because I was confused about it once too. It is not a replacement for alternate picking.

This is more of a trick that you can use for specific effects, kind of like two handed tapping. In a nutshell, this involves strumming a chord slowly with VERY steady timing so you play every note in the chord individually.

It requires a lot or practice (about as much work as mastering normal picking), and guitar players with heavy usage of sweep picking sometimes put a hair scrunchie near the nut to help it sound cleaner. But shredders don't either 'sweep pick or alternate pick'. They either do both or they alternate pick.