Guitar Technique Tutorial: How to Perform

String Skipping
Posted on September 30, 2010 by Don J MacLean
Have you ever been working on a guitar song and get to a part where your
pick-hand stumbles a bit?

Frequently the cause of this pick-hand stumble is because your pick-hand

has to jump over two or more strings to play the next note. This is
called string skipping.
In this tutorial we look at the guitar technique string skipping. You’ll
learn what it is, how to perform it and you’ll learn some guitar technique
exercises to help you master it.
String skipping simply means that you are playing notes on one string and
then skip over one or more strings to play the next note. String skipping
can be quite tricky at times. So let’s look at some exercises you can work
on to master it.
Be sure to practice each exercise slowly and make sure you produce clear
notes.

Generally you will find alternate picking to be the most efficient way to
play passages on non-consecutive strings. But this rule is not set in stone.
Sometimes it will make more sense to use sweep picking. Context should
be the ultimate judge.
String Skipping Exercise # 1
This exercise skips over one string and should be played ascending to the
12th fret and then backwards to the first fret. The exercise is shown for
strings 3—1, but should also be practiced with the following string
groupings: 4—2; 5—3; and 6—4.

String Skipping Exercise # 2

This exercise skips over 2 strings and like exercise 1 it should be played up
to the 12th fret and then played backwards to the first fret. The exercise is
shown for strings 4—1, but should also be practiced with the following string
groupings: 5—2, and 6—3.
The above two exercises just used the finger combination 1-2-3-4. You can
also do string skipping exercises with different finger combinations. For
example, 1-2-4-3, 1-3-2-4, 1-3-4-2, 1-4-2-3 and 1-4-3-2, etc. can all be
used with string skipping.

Performance Tip
To finish off this tutorial, I want to leave you with a tip.

When you encounter an area in a song where you frequently make errors,
you should aim to isolate and eliminate the trouble spot.
Let’s say that you are having trouble with the string skip from the fourth
string to the first string in the example shown below.

What do you do?

You isolate and eliminate.

You look closer and discover the actual trouble spot in the passage:
So what you do is focus on just the trouble spot. In other words, ignore
everything else and just focus on the notes on the fourth string and the first
string.
Practice these two notes:

Once you feel comfortable with this, expand out by adding in one note
before the string skip.

Practice this until you’ve got it down. Then add in the next note after the
string skip.
Now focus on this passage until you’ve got it down.

Next, simply repeat this process until you’ve added in the notes in the
phrase before and after your string skip and bingo─you’ll have that string
skip nailed down!