Paul Gilbert is the man who once taught alternate picking with an actual power drill, so you already know we are not here to gently strum a campfire ballad. This is Lick #32, a shred lick built in his style, and it is roughly 26 seconds of my picking hand pretending it went to Berklee.
It is fast, it is precise, and it is the kind of high-energy rock virtuosity that sounds impressive at full speed and absolutely humbling at 60 bpm. If you have ever wanted to push your speed and picking accuracy without joining a cover band, this little Paul Gilbert style shred lick is a lovely (read: brutal) place to start.
How this Paul Gilbert style shred lick works
The engine here is strict alternate picking — down, up, down, up — with the notes grouped in sixes so the line cascades down the strings instead of just running a boring scale up and back. That "sixes" idea is pure Gilbert: you play a six-note cell, shift, and repeat, which keeps the pattern rolling while your pick never gets a day off. Throw in a bit of string skipping and you get that jumpy, angular sound that makes a plain scale suddenly sound like a solo.
The concrete takeaway: do not chase the tempo, chase the sync between your two hands. Set a metronome slow enough that every single note is clean, loop four bars, and only nudge it up 4 bpm once it is boring. Speed is just accuracy that got comfortable — the fast part shows up on its own once the fretting and picking hands stop arguing. If you want more of this, my alternate picking exercise and the Olympic string-skipping arpeggios are the natural next steps.
Will you nail it on day one? Absolutely not, and neither did I — I just recorded the take where I finally did not fall over. Grab the Guitar Pro file and the original video on my Patreon, and go annoy your neighbours at full speed.