Looking to improve your hybrid picking technique? Check out these effective hybrid picking exercises to enhance your skills and take your guitar playing to the next level.
Table of Contents
Hybrid picking exercises PDF
My favorite hybrid picking exercises book
The best hybrid picking guitar book is Hybrid Picking Lines and Licks for Guitar by Gustavo Assis-Brasil.
It’s an incredibly in-depth guitar book with 100’s of exercises. I especially love the pentatonic exercises and atonal exercises.
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Hybrid picking exercises tab and explanations
Exercises 1 through 4
Exercise 1: This is a string skipping lick where you’ll use your middle finger to hybrid pick every time you skip a string.
Exercise 2: This is a simple, descending G major arpeggio. You’ll use your middle finger to hybrid pick the high e string, pull-off, pick up on the B string, and down on the G string
Exercise 3: This hybrid picking lick uses groups of 6 in the A minor pentatonic scale. This is the 6-step hybrid picking pattern: pick-hammer-middle-pick-middle-hammer
Exercise 4: This is a simple string skipping lick in the key of C major. Use your middle finger to play the string-skipped notes on the B string.
Exercises 5 through 9
Exercise 5: This exercise uses 9th chords in the key of G major. You’ll use your middle (2nd finger) and ring (3rd finger) fingers to play the ascending notes on the A and D strings.
Exercise 6: This is another exercise in the key of G major. This time you’re playing groups of 4 notes at a time, and the 12-step hybrid picking pattern is:
pick-hammer-hammer-middle; pick-hammer-middle-hammer; pick-middle-hammer-hammer
Exercise 7: This hybrid picking exercise used all 3 hybrid fingers: middle (2), ring (3), and pinky (4). Play the open A note with the pick, then hybrid pick the D, G, and B strings with the corresponding fingers: D (2nd finger), G (3rd finger), B (4th finger)
Exercise 8: This is a descending sequence of diatonic 7th chords in the key of C major. The hybrid picking pattern is: pick-middle-pick-middle. This means you’ll pick the D string, hyrbid pick the G string, pick the B string, then hybrid pick the high e string. This applies to all 4 arpeggios.
Exercise 9: This is an ascending C major 7 arpeggio pattern. The hybrid picking pattern for each group of 4 notes is: pick-hammer-middle-hammer. I apologize, because I forgot to add the hammer-on symbol to the guitar tab.
Exercise 10
Exercise 10: This string-skipping exercise outlines a G major barre chord. The hyrbid picking pattern is simply: pick-middle.
More guitar exercises
Check out my sweep picking exercises post. Sweep picking can be combined with hybrid picking to create a technique called “swybrid” picking, which is pretty cool.
Economy picking is another technique that pairs well with hybrid picking, so check out these economy picking exercises.
Lastly, these alternate picking exercises will help you with guitar speed and precision in a similar fashion to hybrid picking exercises and will contribute to your overall control of tone and technique.
