We’ve all heard two conflicting viewpoints.

The first is that a engineer is only as good as his/her tools allow. The second would be that the tools do not in any way dictate the results.

The short answer is obviously: It depends.

In this short post, I will answer that question first with respect to the guitar, and then more generally as a lead up to my next post, “The Beginners Guitar Budget”.

How Good a Guitar Do You Need

That depends, how good do you want to be?

I mean that seriously. The bottom line is, that as you get better and more technically proficient, you start to ‘feel’ the instrument better. In a sense, you get more picky.

More notably, a lousy instrument does not allow you to play it in certain ways. Ask a concert pianist on the difference between a concert grand piano (cost in excess of hundreds of thousands) and a baby grand (tens of thousands), and he/she will go on about the action of the keys, the quality of the tone, and a hundred other things. They would only play their best on the real grand piano.

Even for the recreational player who wants to bring his/her skills to an intermediate level, I’m very sure the person could tell the difference between a $1000 guitar, and a $100 guitar. The latter would sound muffled, probably have an uneven fretboard. Some notes would be hard to play, and the sound of others would be cut off.

There must be a limit to how low you can go.

Specific Guitar Recommendations

I will recommend that anyone who takes up the instrument take it at least to an intermediate level of proficiency. This means that the quality of the instrument does matter.

The next question is whether you are playing with an acoustic of electric guitar.

If you are are acoustic player, tone is important, and tone is dictated by the type of wood used to make the guitar. Hence, you can get a cheap plywood guitar for probably $100-200 that has lousy tone and a lousy fretboard. Or you could get a middle-of-the-line guitar that would easily last you a good half lifetime that is made of a solid wood body and fretboard (the wood depends on what type of sound you like) [1], and would probably fetch anywhere from $400-2000 depending on the wood quality. Finally, you could go for broke and buy a >$2000 guitar that would probably last you forever. These are typically the types whereby the wood is treated in a specific manner to take the quality of the sound and the overall ease of playing to a great level.

I will say that the price difference reflects a true difference in quality as far as acoustic guitars are concerned. In fact, this would be the same for electric guitars as well.

In this case, we have to deal with a few more variables. First would be the actual precision of the manufacturing of the guitar. Second would be the quality of the pickups, knobs, and optionally, the tremolo system. Third will be the quality of the amplifier. Fourth would be the quality of your effects rig.

Furthermore, I would like to add that if you intend to record your own music, then the quality of the recording equipment and editing software also comes into play. Not to mention the record venue.

Why this is important

Firstly, cheap guitars generally do not have good craftsmanship. The guitar, being a string instrument, must be able to balance the tension of the strings to a great degree. At the same time, it must deliver the right tone and ‘feel’. Even electric instruments made of different types of wood will sound different with the same effects settings. The defining factor is simply when you pick it up and play a cheap instrument and an expensive one side-by-side.

This is important simply because a better instrument is easier to play, and delivers much more consistently in terms of tone. This makes practice a joy. Also, I can bet that if you ask a professional musician, he/she will tell you that the quality of the instrument limits one when performing high-level techniques. For example, a cheap piano’s keys doesn’t bounce up fast enough for certain progressions to be played. (The pianist is literally too fast for the piano)

Next, as an electric guitarist, your effects rig is very important. Frankly speaking. Each additional tool adds ever more to the musician’s creative arsenal. This greatly amplifies his/her creative tendencies and adds on to the overall experience, both for the player and probably more importantly, to a potential audience.

If you give a guitarist a whammy pedal, they will attempt to try to use it to create unique solos. Even a cheap addition like a finger slide will open up ever more options. This is even more prominent when you switch from a guitar without a tremolo system to a nice Ibanez Edge System – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ibanez_Edge

This has implications in composition. Much of the work of musical composition [2] involves trying out different things and keeping what’s good. It’s a hit and miss game, one that you get better as you keep trying. Needless to say, you need the equipment to try in the first place.

It Depends

Of course, I trust people to exercise their own judgment when dealing with such sweeping statements. I have presented a case to support the fact that becoming great as a guitarist demands such equipment.

In some areas it will be less so. For example, you need a tennis racquet to play good tennis, but the difference between a $2000 racquet and a $400 racquet isn’t going to be great. The same goes with items like running shoes.

This will vary greatly from field to field though. A painter may need only a pencil and paper to spark creativity, but still needs a studio to produce great work. Similarly, a fisherman needs a good rod to catch big fish; a lousy one would simply break.

In general, for any pursuit worth becoming the best in the field in, the equipment will matter whether you like it or not. Think of it as a kind of barrier to entry. Which is why I stress the need to look forward and determine how far you want to take your skill, for at the higher levels, it can become quite a sink for cash.

In the end, the short answer to the question is: YES!

—
Notes:

[1] Guitars are made of various types of wood, which directly affects the tone of sound produced by affected the natural resonance of the guitar. Just to give some examples, Spruce body guitars tend to be lighter and give a lighter, resonant, and sharp tone. A mahogany body guitar will then be the opposite, heavy, giving a rich, mellow, and slightly dampened tone. Of course, there is everything in between.

If you were a country guitar player, I doubt you’d get a mahogany guitar.

[2] I need to write an entire different post which shares my own methodology for musical composition. More of that next time.

Related posts:

1. The Guitar Budget
2. Artificial Harmonics

This is the second part of “Guitar Harmonics – A Short Introduction“.

In the post about Natural Harmonics, I mentioned that a harmonic is basically a sounding of the natural overtones of the string in the OPEN position.

That is where we can subject our own modifications to the string and effectively change the position and thus vibrating frequency of these overtones.

Important Note – Acoustic or Electric Guitar

Stylistic Considerations

First and foremost, not everyone would want to use artificial harmonics.

To many styles it would simply be considered dissonance, since it is a single high pitched sound in the midst of a bunch of other notes. Stylistically, this technique is most often used by metal guitarists and various instrumentalists to create that guitar “scream”. Eddie Van Halen can probably be credited for making use of the pinch harmonic, which is an artificial harmonic combined with a vibrato to get a very ‘metal’ and ‘screechy’ sound.

Hence, other players may never use or use this technique so infrequently that they are better off focusing on other techniques.

Ultimately, this rules out most, if not all acoustic guitar players.

Practical Considerations

However, the more important concern is the practical aspects of sounding a harmonic.

By selectively sounding the overtones of a vibrating string, we already lose some of the energy of that string. This results in a reduced volume of the sounded note.

By further artificially shortening the string as is in an artificial harmonic, we lose even more energy, and hence more volume.

Without a suitable pickup, (one that is sensitive to these overtones) the harmonic will ultimately be so soft that it cannot be heard. This again rules out its use by acoustic guitars. One thing to note is that even semi-acoustic guitars (acoustic guitars with a pickup) may not be totally suitable because the natural resonance of the guitars tends to cause some destructive interaction of these overtones and may or may not allow them to be sounded.

This problem is largely avoided with an electric guitar, but may also be subjected to pickup quality.

Pickups

With regards to the pickups, you will find that some pickups will pick up artificial harmonics better than others.

Most notably, the double humbucker variety like the ones I have tend to use some form of noise cancellation mechanism which may cancel out these overtones. Even then, the specifics of the pickups need to be known.

With my guitar, my upper pickup (the ones closer to the fretboard) are designed as a ‘rhythm’ pickup, and will not pick up harmonics well. However, my other pickup, which happens to have less sustain and has a sharper sound, tends to do well with harmonics.

Hence, when I want to use harmonics, I will solely use the lower pickup.

With your own guitar, you will need to experiment to see which pickup gives you the best harmonic sound. Very often, if you have more than one pickup (as is with most guitars), each one is likely to give you a slightly different sound for the same harmonic.

I will admit that with some cheap electric guitars like the ones I used when I started out, identical stock pickups were used which could not pick up these artificial harmonics very well at all.

The point I want to make is: Sometimes, the inability to perform artificial harmonics can be an equipment issue which you cannot solve with good playing technique. This is especially so if you own a cheap guitar (eg: a Starter set)

Alright, now that the theory is all covered, its time to move on to the mechanics of artificial harmonics and ultimately, how to do them.

The Mechanics

In an artificial harmonic, what the player does is basically “artificially” shorten the string with the picking hand. This is done by first, fretting a certain area on the fretboard, and then picking at the correct location with the picking hand, with the thumb gently scraping or touching the string itself, thereby shortening the string by a certain amount, and thus causing a new vibration frequency which is heard as a high pitch sound.

A really good video about artificial harmonics, how they sound, and how to do them can be found on youtube: Beginning Pinch Harmonic Lesson

This is a great primer, but it still leaves some areas pretty vague. Most notably, where do you touch the string with the right hand and how do you touch it. I will try to explain that here, with the help of a picture:

Let me explain this picture. It is obviously a picture of the pickup area on my guitar. Recall that harmonics are basically done by cutting the string at specific points. These points typically do not vary much for the given guitar. For my guitar, the coloured lines across represents the area that my right (picking hand) hand thumb touches the string to ‘cut’ it and give an artificial harmonic.

This area changes depending on which fret I’m fretting. Typically, the area which you need to touch with the picking hand moves downward (in the picture) as you fret higher and higher notes. It then can be said to ‘reset’ itself. In the case of my guitar, this was at the 8 semitone mark. Hence if I want to create a harmonic on the 9th fret and then on the 17th fret, it will correspond to the same place I touch with my right thumb.

If I wanted a harmonic on the 10th fret, I would simply move slightly higher than the 9th fret position.

Do note, that these positions are solely for my guitar. Your guitar will have its own due to the difference in construction, etc. But the important thing to note is that they are consistent (unless you fiddle around with things like string clearance, truss rod tension, etc).

Finally, here is a video of some differences between natural and artificial harmonics compared to regular playing. I tend to like to practice technique without an amplifier for the reason that you hear the ‘true’ sound of the guitar. In this case, you will have to hit the harmonic spot on for you to even hear it properly, and hence it is my version of “perfect practice”.

Possible Cues

As with most guitar skills, there should be certain cues by which allow you to achieve smooth technique. In a sense, it is about not thinking about anything else but that single cue.

One of the good cues which arguably most people will use is to simply think of rotating the wrist outwards (ie: away from the guitar) while simultaneously moving down.

So you would simply position the pick under the strings, and then pick it in outwards and downwards.

Another possible cue is to simply think of picking downwards “harder” with “more force”. For some reason this seems to work for some people.

Whatever your cue, you should have one to consistently remind yourself of the mechanism of picking. It’s a way to let your body know what to do, even if your mind does not really know the specific actions to take.

Closing

Last and certainly not least, the most important thing is practice.

Set up your cues, and keep drilling them until you can simply recall that single cue and pull of an artificial harmonic.

Get to Guitaring!

Related posts:

1. Natural Harmonics
2. Guitar Harmonics – A Short Introduction
3. A Discussion on Picking – Holding the Pick

This is the first section of “Guitar Harmonics – A Short Introduction”

Natural Harmonics are called ‘natural’ mainly because they utilize the natural nodes of an open string.

This means that you can do natural harmonics just by picking and touching the string at certain areas on the string with the fretting hand (usually the left for right handed players).

That may not sound like it makes much sense. It will when you know how to do artificial harmonics, which have to be done not just with the left hand, but also with the right hand. A better description will come with the next article on artificial harmonics.

Alright, now lets explain a little bit of Theory:

The Basic Theory

You can get a great explanation of harmonics on wikipedia on the article on ‘Guitar Harmonics‘. However, as stated before, it can get really technical and thus some distillation of information is required.

Essentially, you really only need to know one thing.

That is that a harmonic is created by sounding the natural overtones of an open string. What you are doing in a natural harmonic, is shortening the string by an integral factor. This means halving the string, cutting the string into 4, 5, or any other integer.

By shortening the string, you essentially get it to vibrate at a higher frequency. By cutting it in half, you cause it to vibrate twice as fast, and thus, the pitch is twice as high.

Now, take a look at the image below:

Taken From the Wikipedia article on "Guitar Harmonics" (Click to view large image)

This image shows us the many many different natural harmonics that can occur on the fretboard.

However, trying to sound all of them will be met with failure, at least in the practical sense.

By trying to ‘cut the string into too many parts’, the volume of the harmonic is essentially made so soft that you can’t hear it.

For practical purposes, the 3 main natural harmonics occur at the 1st (halving the string), 2nd (cutting the string into thirds) and 3rd (cutting into quarters) nodes. These correspond to the 12th fret, 7th fret and 5th fret respectively.

Now that the theory is done with, let’s get on to…

How to Do Harmonics

Admittedly, this is the shortest section.

It is the shortest mainly because natural harmonics are so easy to do!

You do them by lightly touching the area that corresponds to this factor, and then picking with the right hand, while simultaneously letting go of the fretting hand.

Alright, that sounded a little complicated, so let’s break it down into 3 simple steps.

• Depress the string slightly with the left hand so that it just touches the 12th, 7th or 5th fret. Make sure it touches it very lightly.
• Get your right hand into picking position
• Count 1,2,3 and pick with the right hand while releasing the left hand at the same time. You will hear a high pitch sound which should correspond to the note + 1 octave

That’s it! Now all you need to do is to keep practicing them until you can pull them off without thinking.

I must mention that the easiest harmonic to do will be the one on the 12th fret, while the hardest of the 3 will be the one on the 5th fret. By ‘hard’, I mean that the timing of the right hand picking and the left hand release must be better aligned. In a sense, this is sorta because cutting the string into quarters (as is with a 5th fret harmonic) is ‘harder’ than cutting it into half (on a 12th fret harmonic).

So if you haven’t tried harmonics, try them out now and see how you can place them into your playing.

Related posts:

1. Artificial Harmonics
2. Guitar Harmonics – A Short Introduction
3. A Discussion on Picking – Holding the Pick

Image Credit: Sebastian.Exploratorium

Guitar Harmonics are cool and can add that sudden zing! to your playing just when people least expect it.

Harmonics can be recognized by the sudden jumps in the pitch of a note. However, when you look at the guitarists hand, he/she may be fretting a 7 fret, but yet it sounds like a 19th fret!

The answer to how this happens lies in the nature of waves.

A vibrating Guitar string is basically a wave, and more notably and standing wave which looks something like the picture on the left. This wave can be then manipulated to achieve a guitar harmonic.

When you do a harmonic, what you are doing is shortening the string by a certain amount, to produce a new note of a certain pitch higher than the fretted note. These are done on various different nodes, and can be actually calculated using various formulas.

Thus, there’s a strict math behind harmonics, and a site like Wikipedia can tell you about that right here.

But that isn’t what I’m going to touch on. I’d rather focus on the practical aspects of harmonics for guitar players.

Note: This is not a discussion on the use of harmonics stylistically, it is just a discussion on how to do harmonics on an acoustic and electric guitar.

Though there are many categories of harmonics, I will categorize them broadly into “Natural Harmonics” and “Artificial Harmonics” and will follow up in two different posts.

Stay tuned.

Related posts:

1. Natural Harmonics
2. Artificial Harmonics

The Decision to play the guitar seated or standing will depend on various factors.

Image Credit: Sator Arepo

Firstly, Refer to the pictures. The first is of a flamenco guitar player. That would be the typical stance for a classical guitar player. It is also customary for one to play in that position during performances, etc.

The second picture is of guitar virtuoso Steve Vai. Like most artists, he is loud and proud and hence would prefer to be rocking out to his music. His performances are thus played standing and usually running around the stage.

So the first and most important factor in deciding whether to playing standing or sitting is the position in which you will likely be making a performance in. Logic follows then that you should invest some of your practice time to playing in that position.

That said, the answer for classical or flamenco players would be straightforward.

However the answer obviously isn’t as straightforward for those who perform standing up…

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.

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Image Credit: MaartenG

The reason is because playing standing is usually harder than playing seated.

This is then because when you are seated like in the first picture, your fretting hand (in this case the left hand) is approximately at or above the line of the chest. This gives a neutral and relaxed wrist position.

Compared to say this picture:

Image Credit: Jake Arciniega

In which the wrist is bent at a 90 degree angle the the fingers needed to be stretched.

But face it, don’t we all want to look like the cool guy in the picture?

But you do get my point. Playing standing demands more finger and wrist flexibility, but strapping the guitar high enough to solve this compromises the ‘guitarist look’.

We then only have 1 solution, which is to increase finger and wrist flexibility and control.

The answer to the question should then be straightforward: If you intend to perform standing, you should practice standing to the extent that it feels like playing sitting down.

There are other factors that come into play during playing standing. Most notably would be the changing of the picking angle and the increased stretch you need to reach certain notes. Such can be solved with various flexibility drills and what not, but the most straightforward way is to simply strap the guitar at waist level and start playing. If you’ve never done it before, you will instantly lose some speed and accuracy.

The last and arguably most important point is that playing standing adds a lot of variety and challenge to an otherwise dull practice session. Sometimes its a lot easier to just lose yourself and have some fun rocking out on the guitar while standing up compared to sitting down. This can then make for much more interesting, and likely much more productive practice.

Myself being biased towards the rock and instrumental genres would recommend anyone to practice standing. Do use your own judgment though and always enjoy the journey!

Related posts:

1. Guitar Harmonics – A Short Introduction

Elegant, short, effective, but certainly not simple. These two licks will certainly help you in general playing if you’ve never tried them before.

These are in my opinion the basic two licks introduced by Paul Gilbert that will really help anyone make progress.

So let’s get straight to them.

The first one is mentioned in this video of a Paul Gilbert Lesson at around 2 minutes. If possible also listen to his advice on alternate picking.

The diagrammatic representation of that lick is given here:

The downward arrows represent downstrokes, and the other symbol represents upstrokes.

It can also be played anywhere on a scale, Eg:

The highlighted part is the actual lick.  I wrote it twice simply to show that:

• The lick can be repeated basically ad infinitum
• It is entirely alternate picking. (down, up, down, up…….)

This is useful for two purposes. Firstly, it helps to synchronise left and right hand action up to high speeds.

Secondly, it scales very well. You can perform it really slow to start with and slowly increase the speed to as fast as you can. That is certainly no easy task once you reach speeds in excess of 180 beats per minute. Hence, it can be a challenge for players of any level. No wonder why Paul still sticks with it!

It looks like this:

Why this lick is really good, is firstly, when we start doing it, you realise that you need plenty of finger flexibility to accurately and cleanly perform the skipping like action over the strings on the first 4 notes.

Secondly, you need quite a bit of left hand stamina to continually do this lick at higher speeds due to the large hops + hammer-on’s and pull-off’s. Thus this lick does build quite a bit of stamina.

And that’s it, straightforward but certainly not easy. These basic licks can be used to great effect by anyone from absolute novice to professional. So in your spare time, fall back on some of the basics like these two and play around with them for a couple of minutes. I think that it will benefit you greatly in playing.

So give it try and let me know what you think.

Related posts:

1. A Discussion on Picking – Holding the Pick

In this post, I elaborate on the basic major and minor scales, and then tell you how to modify and practice scales, which form an essential part of any musical composition.

Let’s not waste any time.

The above is the A Major and A Minor scale. Play them, and you will notice a distinct difference between the way they sound. For those who have no musical knowledge, just know that a minor scale sounds more ‘sad’.

However, as you can see, the notes aren’t that different. You can probably spot the changes yourself.

Also note that you can move the entire pattern up to any starting fret. Meaning that you cold as easily start in a different key, say on the 6th instead of the 5th fret, and then the next note would be the 8th fret, then 10th fret.

Basically, as long as the interval between the notes (ie: the number of frets between each note on the scales) remains the same, the scale will sound harmonised.

Of course, you aren’t limited to a specific range, and the above is simply the same scale played at a higher pitch, specifically one octave (8 notes higher) higher. Notice that I just added 12 frets to the original fret number. This is because 12 frets = 12 semitones = 1 octave. An Octave differences basically sounds the same note, but at a higher pitch. It also works the other way around, meaning 12 semitones lower is an octave lower.

But that’s not that important, at least for the practical aspect of it. What is important is to keep on playing the scales and to memorise the patterns.

But then each string on the guitar is separated by a specific number of semitones. What this means is that you can play the same scale using a different set of strings as shown above.

You can mix and create any combination of notes from the notes in the scale.

The above example shows a pattern in the ascending part of the scale.

However, when we come down, you notice that the fret numbers seem quite different. This is basically just playing the scale in a different way. The notes are essentially exactly the same.

The difference, is in the fingering used and the position of the notes being played. In this case, the right hand descending scale is obviously played on the lower frets (higher on the fretboard) and while it doesn’t really make a difference, some people may have a preference to playing in this area versus at the 5-9th fret region.

And here is just another random pattern which I created off the top of my head in 5 seconds.

The rule is: As long as the notes used are the same, any pattern that fits into the beat of the music can be used

In this case, I used the most basic 4 beat crotchet rhythm.

Then again, what you should do is to experiment and just keep practicing. The key is to drill in the patterns into your finger ‘memory’ and thus make it second nature to yourself.

However, I will recommend strongly that you practice the first 2 basic forms of the major and minor scale religiously.

If not, anything goes. But be sure to get the practice in, the more you practice, the more you will be familiar with the forms.

At the same time, Experiment like Crazy! Go up, go down, twist it here, twist it there, create funny patterns, whatever..

I trust that you have listened to enough music to know if your scale sounds harmonised. If you’re in doubt, always revert to the scales presented by other people and other resources, but never ever think that there is a fixed way to learn scaling. The only way is through practice.

And Here is the Score for that section:

As you can see, I simply chain various scales together, often at random, and then iron out the gaps in between to create a nice chain.

Alright then, get to practicing!

I hope that this post has inspired you to be creative with your practice, If anything, at least you got to listen to some free music!

Related posts:

1. The 2 basic picking licks
2. A Musician’s Appreciation of Music

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.

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:

• Is my arm constantly in tension
• Is the tone correct
• Does this cause my sweeping to be uneven
• Does the pick catch the strings and result in a lot of force required to play

Constantly seek improvements and tweaks, and constantly ask yourself questions. Happy picking!

Related posts:

1. The 2 basic picking licks
2. Artificial Harmonics
3. Natural Harmonics