“Chances are,” wrote the late, great Howard Roberts in the September ’79 GP, “you’ve spent much more time running through scales than practicing interval skips, and, consequently, stepwise lines on adjacent strings predominate in your solos.” Admit it: He’s right. You often hop from one string to the next, but rarely jump over strings. Try Roberts’ rut-busting picking exercise (applied here to a standard sixth-position E major scale), and perhaps you’ll conquer your fear of skipping strings.