Holding the Guitar Pick
In this video I wanted to talk about some of my tips for holding the guitar pick!
Let’s talk about holding the guitar pick!
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Transcription
I thought I'd make a quick little video about the guitar pick and just like a couple little tips, especially if you're new to playing that you might find a little helpful. So the first is how you hold it. So you typically don't want to hold it with the pads of the finger and the pad of the thumb. I call it the puckering grip. And you will see some people doing it and maybe it works for them. But I find that it tends to wiggle its way out a little too much there. It just doesn't seem to have a good grip. The way I’ll hold it is if I'm holding my hand out like I'm going to shake someone's hand, I'll put the back of the pick above that joint, the line of the joint there, and I can balance it like that. And if I curl my fingers in, I can slap my thumb on the big part. So that the tip is sticking out. Almost like an extension of my fingernail. Because when I'm using the pick, I'm only using a bit of the tip. I'm not using a big floppy part of it. Otherwise it's going to be… It's going to be all over the place. It’s going to be slow. It's not going to be very efficient. I want to use just a little bit, it's only a little bit that’s coming out so I can be fast with it. And I can get a good strong grip of it. Now whether your fingers are out or in, like that or like that, it's up to you. I like to have mine out so that I can use it for other things. But you know, it’s up to you. You can do what is comfortable. Either or, it works well. As long as that index finger and thumb are holding the pick there. As far as my tips go for beginners, like brand new to guitar when it comes to guitar picks, first try a bunch of different kinds. Thin, medium, heavy, extra heavy… Try little things like different grips. Some of them will have like a little sandpaper on it that I've seen or grooves… I'll put these Fender Mojo Grips on mine, which is like a rubber casing I can put around the end of it Which I really like. It took a little getting used to, but I like them. Another good tip is to take picks everywhere you go. So for example, if you just have some downtime you're sitting at a table. You could throw it on the table and see, one handed, how quickly can you get it into your pick grip? Or one thing I used to do when I was little bored is I’d throw a pick in the air, catch it and see how quickly can I get it to that picking position without having to use my other hand to kind of put it in its place. The last couple of tips I would have would just be to help getting comfortable using the pick on the guitar. So for example, this one exercise you can do is just hitting one string… Seems kind of silly. But what you want to do is first just see how fast can you get it going down up without losing grip the pick. Kind of self-explanatory. But the next one would be to see how softly can you hit that string going down up, keeping your rhythm. Or how loud. How about going from loud to soft? And then soft to loud. And you can do the same thing with strumming too. You can do soft strums… Loud strums… And then soft… Gradually work your way up to loud… Gradually back to soft… And just other things like see how long can you keep that pick swaying like this back and forth without dropping it. Simple little things like that will really speed up getting comfortable using a pick. And before you know it you'll be using it and you won’t even remember a time where you couldn't hold it comfortably. If you enjoyed the video, give it a like! I appreciate it! If you want to learn more guitar, please subscribe! Love to have you watching some more videos! Just have a good time playing and Happy Practicing!