A Discussion on Picking – Holding the Pick

In this post, I discuss a few methods on how to hold the pick and some examples of picking itself.

Let’s get straight to it.

This First picture Illustrates basically the way in which I hold the pick right now.

Current Method

I hold the pick between the flat side of my index finger and my thumb. This is the style which paul gilbert uses as demonstrated in this video on picking. I highly recommend you watch this video where he discusses many different mechanics of picking.

I myself have experiment with various picking techniques, and here is my angle on this topic.

Some key descriptions of picking

Firstly, I want to break up picking mechanics into two separate categories.

The first is picking angle. This refers to the angle in which the pick strikes the string. The angle is important, because it affects the tone and at times the method and techniques involved in playing.

The second is the picking motion itself. I will separate this into another 2 sub-categories. You can imagine this quite easily using this simple activity. Hold your wrist in place with your non-picking hand. In this position, you can either move your wrist from side to side, or up and down. These are the fundamental actions in any pick stroke. However, most of the time, you will use a combination of these two in over to achieve the required sound or technique.

If all this sounds foreign and hard to visualise, do not worry, as I have attached some videos to illustrate this point.

Starting out

For the first part, I used to hold the pick whichever way I saw fit. At times it would be using 3 fingers, and at times just 2. Sometimes resting the hand against the body of the guitar, and sometimes floating freely.

After 3 months of random experimentation, I settled on this technique from a website, which mentioned that george benson used this technique.

This video demonstrates the method:

The pick is held between the tip of the index finger and the flat side of the thumb. This causes the thumb to straighten out.

The bottom fingers are resting on the body of the guitar. As you can see, the hand is angled downwards, with the palm turned upwards towards the ceiling. This makes the pick become quite angled.

The picking motion was primarily achieved by moving the wrist up and down, with the side to side motion simply to enable my pick to connect with the string.

This style of picking was really effortless, since the angle of the pick was quite steep, meaning that little force was needed to pick the string. The up and down wrist motion was also very comfortable, especially at higher picking speeds. This was to remedy the problem of the entire arm moving when picking with a side to side motion. At higher picking speeds, this created a lot of tension in my arm and led to significant fatigue.

The downsides are the fact that the pick angle makes the style biased towards downstrokes. It made picking in one direction easier than the other. The tone differences between up and down strokes are also prominent. I also found it hard to do artificial harmonics with this style.

There are some people who use this to great effect though. Sam Totman from Dragonforce demonstrates this picking style in this video of the song ‘revelations’ in the recording studio. Note that his palm is angled upwards to the ceiling and the picking motion causes his wrist to look as if it is moving up and down.

Moving on to the Paul Gilbert style

I had much success with the picking method above, and even did numerous performances picking in this way. However, playing music from Artists like Steve Vai, Joe Satriani and Paul Gilbert required various techniques that my picking method just could not achieve. The eventual reason I wanted to change was the inability to get artificial hormonics and tone qualities in playing the song “Rubina” by Joe Satriani.

So I decided to switch styles to that illustrated in the video below:

As you can see, I now hold the pick very differently. It is resting on the flat side of the index finger and the flat side of the thumb. The motion of my picking is still the same as before, but I now have the wrist freedom to alter my picking angle often.

The Video below shows the flexibility of this method. But varying how much the thumb bends, I can effectively change the angle of the strings. (Paul Gilbert covers this too in the picking video I linked above)

Note the ability to vary the tone. I could change the tone from a brushy type to a clear and sharper tone by adjusting the bending of the thumb. This also allowed me to do harmonics and sweeps quite easily.

This makes a huge difference when playing certain styles of music, especially jazz, where tone quality matters quite a fair bit.

Wrist Motion in Picking

As you can see from the above videos. I still pick with the same wrist motion that I started off with when using the old method of holding the pick. My palm is angled upwards, whereas Paul Gilbert picks with his palm facing the body of the guitar. There are numerous great artists who use both techniques. One example of another guitarist who uses the side to side motion and achieves great picking speed is Buckethead.

As you can see in this video of his song “Sige Engine” (watch the whole thing, it’s insane, and in HD!). Fast forward to 3 minutes and beyond to see how he picks at higher tempos.

I also have been asked about resting the hand on the guitar body, illustrated in this video.

Some people have claimed that this restricts certain techniques, and in a way it does. Sweeping is made less fluid by resting the hand in this way. Artists like Buckethead above and Paul Gilbert have their hands floating freely.

However, there are other artists like Michael Angelo Batio. Who pick with their lower fingers clearly using the guitar body as a support for picking. This is illustrated in this video of his Speed Kills lesson preview. As you can see, his speed is certainly amazing, and no one will dispute his ability to play fast and cleanly with a great tone.

So what’s the best method

Judging by the different methods used by the various artists, I would say there is not really a best method so to speak.

It can vary possibly depending on your style of play. A jazz player may favour a more dynamic picking action in which tone can be varied. A shredder like Michael Angelo Batio may want more technical and tonal consistency given to him by the way he picks.

I will state though, that the pick should always be held with two fingers, leaving the ring finger free. This is due to the various techniques that employ this finger, most notably tapping, illustrated in this video of Joe Satriani demonstrating his song ‘Midnight’.

However, it is not wise to transition from one picking method to another. It took me at least 2 months to change my picking style completely, especially since old habits need to be relearned.

I would suggest that you experiment with various picking angles and motions if you are already using a pick. If you are not, and just starting out, then go with one of the styles which a professional uses, and stick to it.

Don’t forget that picking is dynamic, and there are thousands of ways to approach it. The important part is still in experimenting with your own method and then using a form a feedback. Questions that you possibly want to ask yourself are: