Alternate Picking Speed: A Tracking-First Practice Plan

Alternate picking advice is a swamp of technique debates — pick slanting, wrist versus elbow, grip angles. All of it can matter; none of it matters as much as this: pick one short fragment, play strictly alternating down-up at a tempo where every note is clean, and raise the click 5 BPM only after 4–10 clean reps. Everything else is tuning.

Start on one string

String-crossing is a separate skill that hides picking-hand problems. Begin with a one-string fragment — even just tremolo on a single note, or a 4-note pattern — so the only variable is the down-up motion itself. When single-string is clean at your target, add the crossing back as its own fragment.

The strict accounting rule

At speed, most players smuggle in a sneaky double-downstroke at string changes and never notice. Slow the fragment down until you can watch the pick: genuinely alternating, accent on the beat, no swipes. A "fast" run built on inconsistent pick strokes caps early and is miserable to fix later — this is the single most common hidden ceiling.

Burst and sustained are different numbers

• Burst: one bar of sixteenths, then rest. Trains the top-end motion.
• Sustained: 30–60 seconds continuous. Trains the relaxation that survives a song.
• Track them as separate fragments — the sustained number will be lower, and that gap is useful data.

What the log tells you that your hands can't

Picking speed creeps. On any single day you can't feel the difference between 126 and 130, so it always feels like nothing is happening — right up until you look at six weeks of logged clean maxes and the line has climbed 15 BPM. That's the feedback loop that keeps boring, correct practice going.

In Crank., set up "tremolo E string", "3-note-per-string run", "burst" and "sustained" as separate fragments with their own targets, and log the clean max after each session. Free on the App Store for iPhone.