On Facebook, I made a post about a 1980s Paul Gilbert Guitar Player article back in Feb. 2020 about alternative picking.

Essentially, this is the exercise he posted in an old Guitar Player magazine and the example is what you see below. It wasn't until the long, pandemic, stay-at-home that I decided to visit this exercise and it has really improved my picking style.

I used this one exercise while mindlessly sitting on the sofa watching Netflix. If you practice this during the course of watching...End Game, for example, it all counts as practice time. The benefits are you don't have to move your hands and can focus more on/improve your picking accuracy.

I then added a click and slowly increased the speed. With this little nugget of information, I learned there is much more to this simple exercise.

My next update, I'll post how I expanded this beyond what I have heard PG use it.

Am I personally at PG's level? No. Not even close. Am I better at picking than I was in 2020? Yes. Without a doubt.

Paul later "denounced" this exercise and for good reason, and I'll cover that but this exercise has merit.

Notice how there are upstrokes on the downbeats. The picking happens on the outside of the two strings (for the most part). This is key for accuracy later on.