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Building picking speed with small note groupings can vastly improve your picking ability, as well as demystify playing extended groupings of notes. Let's check it out!
First, we'll practice playing a set of two notes as fast as possible. Any note is fine, we're focused entirely on the picking hand here, but I often practice on the low E.
Simply alternate pick two notes, back to back, with as little space between them as possible.
It helps me to think of it as one snapping motion, down-up!, rather than as two separate movements.
Once you feel comfortable with the movement, try repeating sets of two notes tightly together.
It should look something like this.
Once you're comfortable with that, let's move on to sets of 3.
Now, picking will go either down-up-down, or up-down-up.
When you have a grip on it, start repeating sets as we did before, with groups of 2.
For this one, try both playing only sets of down-up-down, and also alternating down-up-down, and up-down-up.
It should look something like this.
You'll find that always start with a downstroke is more consistent, but also takes more energy.
It's more efficient to alternate, but it takes a little practice to get an identical sound both ways.
Now we can try sets of 4. We're back onto an even set of notes, so we don't have to worry about starting on an up or downstroke.
Start repeating sets once you have the motion down, again, try to think of it as one motion. The goal is to build muscle memory on how it feels to play a set of 2, 3, or 4, until we can call on that memory at will without requiring much thought.
It should look something like this.
Do we need to repeat this practice for every set of notes above 4? Not really! Because you've already built the needed muscle memory to play longer sets now.
For example, you might like to think of a set of 5 notes as 4 and 1. Simply play your group of 4 and finish it out with an extra downstroke. Perhaps that seems strange, but if we look at longer sets, you might see the logic.
Take 7. We can break this down into 4 and 3, or into 3, 3, and 1. Whichever you prefer.
Or how about 13? Almost nobody can play a clean set of 13 fast, equally spaced, notes the first time I ask them to.
But when you realize it's just 4, 4, 4, and 1, suddenly it clicks.
A last note on this topic is that it's a good idea to split the note grouping into divisions that fit cleanly within the beats of the bar.
For example, if you're playing 16th notes, thinking in groups of 4 will make the 1st note of each set of 4 align with the beat.
If you're playing 16th triplets however, thinking in groups of 3 (or 6) will keep you better aligned with the strong beats.
And that's all!
If you spend just 15 minutes on this practice, I bet you will make a strong improvement in your picking speed and accuracy.
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