Bach never held a pick, never bent a string, and definitely never skipped one on purpose — yet here we are, hurdling over the middle strings while his 300-year-old counterpoint judges us silently from the afterlife.
This is Lick #13: a string skipping run lifted from Paul Gilbert's electric arrangement of Bach's "Prelude in G Major" (BWV 860, from The Well-Tempered Clavier). It's 51 seconds of proof that a classical line and a rock guitar can share the same fretboard without either one filing a complaint.
How this string skipping lick works
String skipping means exactly what it sounds like: instead of picking neighbouring strings, you leap over one (or more) to reach the next note — the full mechanics live in my String Skipping Technique guide. Bach's arpeggios spell out chords with wide intervals, so instead of cramming everything into one cosy box you jump the D string entirely — say, from the A string straight to the G string — which forces your picking hand to aim like it actually respects gravity. The trick isn't speed. It's muting: the skipped string has to stay dead silent, or the whole thing turns to mush.
Concrete takeaway: start absurdly slow with a metronome and watch your picking hand, not your fretting hand. Anchor with palm muting on the low strings, lean the tip of your fretting finger lightly against the string you're skipping, and only speed up once every note rings clean and the gap stays quiet. This is an arpeggio workout in a Bach costume — those interval jumps are what train the accuracy.
Grab the PDF and Guitar Pro file, work it up at half speed, and eventually you too can disappoint Bach at full tempo. If you want the tabs, the slowed-down breakdowns, and the original videos, I hoard all of that on my Patreon.