Economy picking is what happens when your alternate picking gets a gym membership and then quietly skips leg day — it does the absolute minimum and somehow still ends up faster than everyone else. The idea is gloriously lazy: if your pick is already heading toward the next string, don't bounce back, just let it keep falling in the same direction. Fewer motions, the same notes, and your neighbours never find out you were barely trying.
This 41-second clip is Lick #18, an economy-picking line built on Johann Sebastian Bach's BWV 1054 — yes, the man who wrote baroque counterpoint for a living accidentally left behind the perfect picking-hand workout. It's a classical crossover you can actually use: a baroque melody married to a technique that pays you back for being efficient.
How this economy picking lick works
The whole trick lives in the string crossings. In normal alternate picking, every note flips the pick direction — down, up, down, up — so when you jump to a new string you often have to reverse against the string change and waste a tiny beat of motion. Economy picking says: if your pick is travelling down and the next note sits one string over, let it keep going down in a single smooth "rest stroke" that lands on the new string. Two adjacent notes, one continuous motion. Do the same going up. Bach's scalar runs in BWV 1054 — really his Violin Concerto in E major, BWV 1042, wearing a harpsichord costume — cross strings constantly, so those savings pile up fast.
The concrete takeaway: grab one three-note-per-string scale shape and force yourself to cross strings only in the direction the pick is already moving. Play it slow, watch that the pick "falls through" instead of bouncing, and add speed only once that motion is honest. Get this into your hands and half the baroque repertoire stops feeling like a workout and starts feeling like a downhill roll. If robbing Bach appeals to you, I did the exact same thing to his Toccata and Fugue, and economy picking's flashier cousin is sweep picking.
The tab, the Guitar Pro file and a slowed-down version are all hiding behind a very reasonable bribe on Patreon — Bach would've had one too if PayPal had existed in 1738.