ONE EXERCISE.
PLAY IT WITH ME.

However much you want to, do not let economy picking creep in. Do not let legato creep in either.

The whole point is connecting every single picking stroke to every single scale note. The moment you slur one or take the easy path across a string, the exercise stops doing its job.

• Down, up, down, up, all the way through, both positions
• No hammer-ons or pull-offs, even where they would feel natural
• No sweeping across adjacent strings, even where it would be faster

When you play scales with more than one stroke per note, you are almost always thinking in groups of two, groups of four, or triplets. Your hands know those shapes. You can run them half asleep.

This one starts with a single sixteenth note, and then moves into groups of two for the rest of it.

That one missing note at the start throws the whole thing off its axis. The accents shift further and further away from the click as you go, and there is no familiar pattern underneath for your hands to coast on.

Both hands have to actually agree with each other, note by note, because nothing else is holding it together.

Start at the tempo where it is genuinely clean, not the fastest one you can survive. The tempo in the video is deliberately higher than a comfortable starting point, so slow it down until every note is sitting exactly where it should be, then build from there.

And once it is under your fingers, do not leave it as an exercise.

Apply the pattern to other scales. One note, then groups of two, works anywhere on the neck. It has a genuinely nice sound to it, somewhere in classical and neoclassical territory, so it can go straight into your playing rather than living only in your practice routine.