There is no melody here. No emotion. No key you could name at a dinner party. This is a chromatic alternate picking lick, which means it sounds like a caffeinated spider falling down a flight of stairs — and that is exactly the point.
This is Lick #12, a compact little machine built to sharpen your right-hand precision and grind some endurance into your picking hand. Chromatic runs are the gym equipment of guitar: nobody plays them at the show, everybody trains on them. If you want the musical version of this idea, go poke at my chromatic approaches — but first, let's suffer.
How this chromatic alternate picking lick actually works
Alternate picking just means strict down-up-down-up, no matter what the notes do. The chromatic part — playing every fret in a row, one finger per fret — keeps your fretting hand on autopilot so your picking hand gets all the attention. The real villain is the string crossing: going from one string to the next mid-pattern forces "inside" picking, where the pick has to hop back over a string it just left. That is where nine out of ten players secretly cheat by sneaking in two downstrokes.
Concrete takeaway: set a metronome slow enough that every single note is clean, keep the pick motion tiny (you are wiggling, not rowing a boat), and watch the exact moment you change strings — that is the only bar you're actually training. Speed is a side effect of clean string crossings, not the goal. For the same idea with an actual tempo target, try my alternate picking speed drill or the slow-fast speed burst.
Grab the PDF and Guitar Pro file, loop it until your neighbours file a noise complaint, and if you want the original videos and tabs for everything, I keep the good stuff on Patreon — where the chromatic scale is finally treated with the respect it never earned.