Cameron Mizell

Every other Wednesday or so I’ll be sharing some guitar playing tips. We’ll start with basic techniques that, while simple, are important skills to maintain for even the most advanced players. If you haven’t read these before, I’ve written two previous posts for guitarists:

1. 10 Tips for Beginning Guitarists
2. My Guitar Warm-Up Routine

The warm-up routine above only discusses exercises from a left hand perspective, warming up the fingers on the fretboard. But if you’ve played through some of those exercises you’ll notice that the picking can get a little tricky. So today we’re going to talk about the right hand, specifically, alternate picking.

I started paying attention to my own picking technique lately as I put this lesson together, and I found that probably 90% of the time I’m using alternate picking for melodic lines and to arpeggiate chords while playing rhythm guitar. The rest of the time I’ll use sweep picking or hybrid picking, but only when alternate picking can’t produce the articulation or rhythm the line needs.

Alternate picking is the act of switching between downstrokes and upstrokes. This is much like strumming rhythm guitar–the motion of your arm keeps a constant up-down motion and occasionally misses the strings. The motion creates a steady time feel, but by not hitting the strings on every pass you create a more interesting rhythm. But even though the idea is the same, I’ve witnessed many beginning and intermediate guitarists that play great rhythm guitar really struggle with alternate picking.

Along with the exercises below, use alternate picking on all your scales, arpeggios, or whatever other exercises you practice. Work it into your regular routine until it becomes a habit.

Exercise 1: Countdown

Mute the strings with your left hand so all your focus is on your picking effort. Start on the lowest string with a downstroke, alternate pick four times, and move to the next string, continuing the alternate picking pattern to the top string and back down. Start again with only three plucks per string, then two, then one. Then do the whole thing over again but start with an upstroke. (Click on the image for a larger, easier to read size.)

Notice that when you pluck the first string an odd number of times, the following string starts with an upstroke. Pay attention to how your pick moves from the downstroke of one string to the upstroke of the next, especially when you’re picking once per string.

Exercise 2: Minimal Effort

To increase picking speed, you have to relax your hand and use the smallest movement necessary to hit the string and come back the other direction. You can do this exercise using the same pattern as Exercise 1, and also apply it to Exercise 3 below.

Start with the pick at rest on the top of the string. Pluck the string with a downstroke and then immediately rest it on the underside of the string. Play an upstroke and immediately rest it on the top of the string. Repeat. Go slow and take as much time as you need between each movement. You’ll build up speed as your muscles learn the minimum amount of effort needed to pluck a string.

Exercise 3: String Skipping

This series of exercises is similar to those above, but we’ll be skipping strings, making your picking hand cover more distance. These exercises will help you arpeggiate chords more deliberately, very useful for playing rhythm guitar.

More Guitar Picking Techniques

Speed: Picking fast has always been one of my weaknesses. The key to playing faster is to simply relax. Playing music has never been a feat of strength, but when we run into fast tempos it’s natural to tense up and try to plow through. To help relax your picking hand, relax your other hand. Tension is symmetrical. If you are gripping the neck of the guitar too hard, you’re probably also holding the pick too tightly and have too much tension in your picking hand. Relax, loosen up, and the speed will come to you!

Volume: Picking with minimal effort usually results in a quieter, smaller sound. If you don’t pluck the string very hard, it’s not going to ring very much! I picked up a tip from somebody I play with in a bluegrass band:

If you keep your fingers together, there is more mass focused on the pick, and you’ll automatically get more volume. It’s simply a matter of physics. I’ve also heard of guys practicing with a stone in their picking hand, which just takes the idea a step further.

Keep the fingers of your picking hand together to increase volume.

Velocity also creates volume. The faster the pick moves when it plucks the string, the more volume you’ll get. This doesn’t mean you have to play harder, rather you just have to learn to play through the string. Strike the string like you mean it! The exercises above will help develop the control and confidence you need to do that.

Improving Tone: Ever notices how a dozen guitar players playing the same acoustic guitar can all sound different? This is because so much of our tone comes from the way we pick the strings. I’ve experimented with many types of picks looking for something that suits my playing style, but ultimately, anything with a smooth surface and clean release can produce good tone.

The key is to hold the pick at a slight angle to the string so you are actually picking with the edge, and not just the flat side. Your tone also changes depending on how close to the bridge or neck you pluck the string and what string you play the note on. Great players will constantly adjust their pick angle and where they attack the string to create a more interesting and musical sound.

Hold your guitar pick at an angle to the string for a bigger tone.

Playing Triplets: One of the dilemmas with alternate picking is that you’re locked into an 8th note or 16th note rhythm. The constant down/up is great for keeping steady time when the beat is divided evenly, but what about odd divisions like triplets? There are a few ways to play through triplets:

• Slur – A hammer-on or pull-off between two of the notes prevents the rhythm from interrupting the down/up motion of the pick.
• Double Downstroke – If you alternate pick a triplet, the third note will be a downstroke. Follow that with another downstroke for the next beat. This is naturally easier if the note on the next downbeat is on a higher string, so the pick can continue in a downward motion across the adjacent string, very similar to the next technique…
• Sweep Picking – This is where you pick several adjacent strings in the same direction, literally sweeping across the strings. Like strumming but in a slower, controlled manner. Sweep picking triplets is especially ideal for arpeggios or larger intervals, but with creative fretwork you can work out scaler lines with sweeps.

Articulating: Finally, to keep your playing interesting, you’ll need to learn to accent some notes while ghosting, or barely playing, others. This creates a more dynamic arc to your melodies. To work on this, play the exercises above but accent the first of every four notes, then the second, third, and so on. Learn how it feels to play adjacent notes so the technique can happen naturally when you’re playing melodies.

While studying jazz in college, I realized that I learned the most from transcription. When I think about it, the goal of the curriculum was to teach me how to do what the guys on the record were doing. While it helps to have an instructor or mentor review your progress, correct your mistakes, and help you through difficult passages, it really all comes down to using your ears to sound like the soloist in the recording.

Transcribing is such an effective way to learn because you’re learning more than just the notes on a piece of paper, you’re also learning how to imitate tone, feel, and inflections. Nuance. These are things that can’t be notated and can’t really be taught in private lessons.

This exercise shouldn’t be reserved only for jazz musicians. As my tastes have branched out, I keep finding beauty and genius in other styles of music, by artists that probably had much less formal training than me, if any at all. I want to learn from all of them.

It seems to me a lot of musicians now get so preoccupied with establishing their own sound or their own style that they forget to really explore the music of the artists that inspire them the most. Take a moment to think about how your favorite artists got to be as good as they are now. How did they develop their style? What makes their sound so recognizable?

Chances are, it took years of focused development, one way or another. Do you really think there’s a shortcut?

Tributary is now available everywhere digital music is sold! Please take the links above to download the album. The price should be about the same everywhere, but for what it’s worth, more of the purchase price makes it’s way to me when you buy it at Bandcamp. To sweeten the deal, I’ve added a digital booklet and video to the album exclusively at Bandcamp.

If you would like a CD, you can still pre-order and get the download today. I am working hard to raise the rest of the money needed to fund CDs, so your orders are greatly appreciated. Plus, you can get a cool looking T-Shirt designed by Philip Manning, inspired by the album, and even some custom Junior’s Swamp Sauce Hot Sauce with your pre-order. Check out the deals on the pre-order page!

About Tributary

Tributary is my third full length album, and the first I feel is an honest effort to create a complete work. To me, this isn’t just a collection of songs. Each tune is a tip of the hat to one or more of the musicians that have influenced me since I began seriously studying the guitar, and music as a whole. That journey started with jazz, but took me to funk, soul, hip hop, blues, Americana, folk, rock, country, and back. I’ve recently realized most of the music I love rests on the shoulders of Muddy Waters, Robert Johnson, and Charlie Christian.

Tributary is also a nod to St. Louis, Missouri, the town where I was born and raised. The city has an incredibly rich cultural history, largely because its location on the Mississippi and Missouri rivers allowed it to become the second largest port in the US during the mid 19th Century. Major travel routes that criss-cross the country have always stopped through St. Louis, bringing many musicians, artists, and writers to and from the city–not to mention the many who are from the area, including Miles Davis, Grant Green, and Chuck Berry. St. Louis has always been a music town, closely linked with jazz, blues, and rock & roll. However, there’s no defining genre associated to the city, like Chicago blues or Memphis soul, instead the music of St. Louis is very much a melting pot of styles from everywhere else–much like a musician funneling a wide range of influences into a personal sound.

I wrote the music for Tributary gradually during a two year period, introducing the tunes to Brad and Kenneth one at a time over the course of many gigs. The three of us broke them in and exposed the weak spots, giving me a chance to adjust the arrangements until they felt natural. The long incubation period also granted me time to realize my larger vision of composing tunes that fit together, borrow from each other, and hopefully paint a bigger picture for the listener.

Part of the bigger picture, for me at least, was to incorporate some of the sounds, textures, and people I’ve worked with in my other musical outlets. After two days of tracking the trio, I brought the tracks home and added some additional instrumentation. I also enlisted the help of two very talented singers to add some background vocals. Erika Lloyd, who Brad, Kenneth and I all play with in the band Little Grey Girlfriend, and Lauren Zettler, a singer/songwriter who I’ve been writing, recording, and touring with since ’08, contributed layered vocals on one track each. The sum of these parts has made Tributary truly representative of the last several years of my overall creative output.

“Ghost Town” from Tributary set to some beautiful photos of abandoned buildings and American ruins by Lauren Farmer. If you like these photos, please check out Lauren’s online print store. And of course, you can still pre-order a CD of Tributary and get some cool bonus items.

While employed at the Verve Music Group, one of the people I had the pleasure of working with was Harry Weinger. He is a catalog A&R guy, a reissue producer, and he knows his records. This was exciting for me because he has been involved in countless James Brown reissues, and I love some JB.

One day Harry asked me to come listen to “Say It Loud–I’m Black and I’m Proud” to see if I noticed anything unusual. He was putting together some liner notes and had recalled a lunch with Alfred “Pee Wee” Ellis, a Brown bandleader and co-writer of this song, where Ellis talked about how the drum part was written in such a way to keep the song moving forward. Harry couldn’t recall exactly what Ellis had said, and I couldn’t catch it sitting in his office, so I made it a small transcription project.

I should preface the discussion of the transcription by saying that I’m not a drummer and haven’t talked about this beat with any drummers. I also used three different recordings to figure out what was going on:

• The original 1968 studio recording.
• Live in Dallas, Texas 8/26/68
• Live in Augusta, Georgia 10/1/69

The drums are slightly different in each version, but the main hi-hat, snare, and bass pattern is fairly consistent. Listen for yourself to pick up on the nuances.

The key to the tune and the forward motion is the 5 bar phrase in the repeats, and the fact James Brown is singing in 4 bar phrases over the top. Below is the explanation I emailed Harry:

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I transcribed this earlier today, and as soon as I wrote down the drum part and followed along with JB singing, I figured it out. The band is playing a 5 bar phrase. This starts on the 7th bar of the tune, which is the bar where the snare first hits on beat 3 instead of beat 4. They play it seven times, but the last time they go to the bridge 1 bar early. So you get 34 bars total before the bridge. That’s odd.

But what makes it work is that JB is singing 4 bar phrases, except for the 4th time where he makes it a 6 bar phrase. This makes that odd bar with the hits land in a different spot on each 4 phrase, and it only lands at the beginning of the phrase the first and last time. See:

Bar with hits / Phrase
1 / 1
2 / 2
3 / 3
4 / 4 (six bar phrase)
3 / 5
4 / 6
- / 7 (no hits in this phrase)
1 / 8 (band plays 4 bar phrase)

Anyway, that definitely makes for some forward motion in the tune, and also some confusion on the band stand–they’re not all in the same place all the time, and JB takes it to the bridge whenever he feels like it on the live versions.

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Even if you’re not a drummer, you can take something away from this. Odd numbered phrases are a great way to emphasize parts of a form, or in this case, forward motion.