String skipping licks can be like landmines scattered throughout a song, just waiting to trip you up and ruin your clean alternate picking.

While running up and down scales or the 1234 exercise will do wonders for your picking speed, if you want that speed to transfer over to playing real songs (and especially if you want your picking to sound clean at high speeds), you must incorporate some string skipping specific exercises.

Today’s workout demonstrates a simple way to convert any scale into a fantastic exercise for improving your string skipping.

The Minor Pentatonic Box Shape

Today’s exercise is based off of the fifth position (i.e. starting at the fifth fret) A Minor Pentatonic scale. If you don’t know it, learn it. It is one of the most widely used scale patterns in all of western music. I find myself using it often when improvising in genres from rock and blues to bluegrass and jazz.

Here it is…

Take a couple minutes to memorize this scale pattern before moving on to the workout.

String Skipping Through the Pentatonic Scale

Now, all we need to do to turn this scale (or any other scale) into a finger-busting string skipping exercise is rearrange it to include playing on non-adjacent strings.

One way to do that is to start playing the scale on the 6th string, skip the 5th string and play the 4th string, go back and play the 5th string, skip the 4th string and play the 3rd string, etc. Just look at the TAB and it’ll make sense…

Click here to be emailed the Higher Quality PDF of the TAB for better printing! Bonus: Click Here for the TAB of the string skipping example lick in the video.

Practice that for 15 minutes today, and you will be noticeably better tomorrow. It’s that simple.

Remember consistent, focused practice (even for very short amounts of time) will ALWAYS get better results that infrequent binge-practicing. So get to it!

Efficient Practice Instructions: