Guitar for the Absolute Beginner #2: How I hold a guitar pick

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How you hold your guitar pick is one of the most important things to learn early on. Learn it wrong and you’ll find yourself unlearning a bad habit later on. While many people have success holding it in slightly different, even “wrong”, ways, you want to make sure that you do two things:

1. Leave only a little bit of the pick exposed at the end where you attack the strings. This will help you have good tone and will also make your picking more efficient.
2. Make sure the pick is perpendicular to the strings when playing.

How does one do these two things, you ask? For me it involves holding the pick as follows. I’ve split it up into three steps.

1. Position the pick halfway between the end of your index finger and your first joint. The pick will face away from you with about 1/3 of the pick hanging over the end of your finger:

2. Place your thumb over the pick at roughly the same angle as that created by the angle of the pick, leaving about 1/4 inch of the pick exposed.

3. Using your other hand, turn the pick so that the tip is halfway between your thumb and index finger. Imagine your fingers as a pair of scissors with the pick positioned in between. 

For reference, your grip will look something like this from the following angle.

Eventually holding your pick will become second nature, but for the first couple of weeks go through this process to make sure you’re doing it “right”. I cannot emphasize strongly enough the importance of the “two things” from earlier!

A couple of other notes: 

• Get yourself a BUNCH of picks! They aren’t exactly a dime a dozen, but they’re cheap. Buy a dozen (about $5-6 worth) and leave them in various places you might find yourself needing a pick. Trust me - few things are more frustrating than not having a pick when you’re ready to play.
• They make picks in all different shapes and sizes. I would start with MEDIUM. You can always change later when you have a better idea of your individual needs.

If you enjoyed this post you might like these:

• Guitar Horror Stories
• 5 Ways You Can Play Guitar Faster Right Now
• A little survey
• How I practice
• Guitar for the Absolute Beginner: How to play guitar in 30 days

Tags: guitar, guitar lessons

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 10th, 2009 at 11:46 pm and is filed under Guitar for the Absolute Beginner, Lessons. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.