Athletic Approach to a Fast Picado

Chronicling 3 Months of Exercises to Gain Speed

As a guitar player I’ve never been able to play fast using a plectrum. In fact I’ve nearly given up on using a pick all together. I’ve gained a significant amount of speed via tapping in the last 12 years but now I’m up for a new challenge. Yodeling! No, just kidding… Picado. Picado is a playing technique where a guitarist plays scale passages by alternating the index and middle fingers. Picado is normally executed apoyando (with rest strokes). To play this way cleanly and at hi speeds is a daunting task for most players. Turning to the internet for help and after many Google searches there seems to be no one clear cut way or lesson course on how to archive this. So the runner in me is saying to take an athletic approach. Just like I would give myself 3 months to train my two legs for a race I will relate the same line of thinking for my two fingers to play a decently fast picado.

I’ll have my easy running days which will relate to scale practicing.

Hill training could be something like arpeggios that involve a lot of string crossing.

Interval runs and plyometrics will be picado speed bursts.

The weekly long run will in turn be an extra long day of slow scale practicing.

And of course the all important stretching and rest day.

I’ll chronicle my 3 months of training the best I can with videos measuring notes per beat via metronome, examples of the exercises I’m using, etc.. Hopefully if this goes well it will give other players a unique perspective into time + effort = these results.

The 1^st step is to measure my picado speed now so I have something to compare it to 3 months from now.

New Challenge, Picado

For the past 15 years I’ve had this passion to play Flamenco guitar but have done nothing about it until now. Two weeks ago I purchased a nylon string guitar am I am loving it! I’ve been working out of Gerhard Graf-Martinez’s Flamenco Guitar Method Vol I book for the past couple weeks and it’s going really well. My only criticism of the book is that there seems to be nothing on picado. Perhaps this comes into play in Vol II or maybe in traditional flamenco most single note lines are only played with the pulgar (thumb). Yet, I watch great players like Paco De Lucia and Ottmar Liebert and picado is very much integrated in the flamenco music they play. To me, picado seems to flamenco music’s most challenging technique. Everything else but perhaps the Glope has come to me relatively easy. I think its best I start working on it now than later. After giving it a lot of thought about how to go about it, the runner in me is saying to take an athletic approach.