Starting with the Right Hand

There is a natural tendency for beginning guitar players to concentrate on the fretting hand. The thought is that this is the hand that does the work and therefore needs to be improved. Additionally, since most people pluck the strings with their dominant hand they tend to forget about it and concentrate on the “weaker” hand.The truth is that a strong right hand (for those who are right-handed) technique is much more difficult to develop. Remember, the right hand is the engine that drives the train.

I encourage beginners to use a pick. I am predominantly a fingerstyle player and love the versatility of playing with my fingers, but for most guitar players I wouldn’t recommend starting that way.

In this episode we’ll talk about picks, holding the pick and the most fundamental pick stroke.

There is an amazing variety of guitar picks that are available. They vary in size, material, thickness, shape, etc. There are as many types of picks as there are players and ways of playing the guitar. The most common type of pick that is available is the large, thin, triangular pick that can be found in a dazzling array of colors at your local music store. I don’t like these picks. I find them to be too large and too flimsy to give me the control that I need. Instead, I prefer the smaller and more stiff teardrop picks.  Most serious guitar players that I know prefer these picks as well.  However, there are many very accomplished guitar players who prefer the larger and thinner picks.  To each his own.

This used to be an issue that I felt very strongely about. I felt that the thinner guitar picks induced begginers to grip the pick too tightly, and I beleived that it started bad habits. But in time I’ve come to realize that different people react to different equipment in different ways, and for some people the small stiff picks cause a real issue. What I tend to do now is to give my students a variety of different picks and let them choose for themselves.

There are a million ways that you could hold a pick. But there is one way that is seen as superior, or traditionally accepted. There are other ways of holding a pick that are also considered acceptable, and many many more that are completely impractical.

The traditional way of holding the pick is to form your hand as though you were hitchhiking. Hold your hand with a loose fist and with your thumb pointing to the sky. Then place the pick on the first knuckle of your index finger pointing slightly back towards your wrist. Then simply place your thumb over the pick. There should be very little of the pick that is showing from above.

This is how I started out learning to pick, but over time my grip has relaxed and now the pick sits more towards the tip of my finger rather than on top of the first knuckle.

A popular way of picking is the George Benson style. In this style the pick crosses the string across the thin portion of the pick instead of the typical flat portion. To do this you have to angle your thumb backwards or place the tip of your thumb against the flat portion of the pick. This style can help your picking speed to be incredibly fast, but it limits certain techniques, such as sweep picking and makes cross string leaps very difficult.

The first and most fundamental picking stroke is to use the entire forearm moving as one unit from the elbow. You simply pick down across the string and then back up across the string striking it in both directions. Every upstroke is followed by a down stroke, and every down stoke followed by an upstroke. This is called alternate picking.

You pluck the strings using only the tip of the pick. There is no need to dig into the strings. Hold your pick perpendicular to the face of the guitar body. Don’t angle the pick so that the angle of attack on the upstroke is different from that of the down stroke.

One of the first very first exercises that I will have my students do is to simply practice holding the pick properly and picking notes on all six strings using alternate picking. After getting comfortable with this you can add a metronome, then later practice changing strings while picking without missing a beat. Perhaps 2 ups, and 2 downs on the Low E string, followed by 2 up and 2 down on the A string, etc.