Lauren Bateman shows how to grip a guitar pick so it stays put while you strum. Keep your wrist relaxed but hold the pick firmly with your thumb and first finger curled over it, or add a second finger for faster playing. Lighter picks and textured ones like Dunlop Max Grip help prevent slipping.
Hey guitar enthusiasts. In this lesson we're going to be going over how to hold your guitar pick.
Now a top question I get asked by people is Lauren, how do I hold my guitar pick for strumming and not have the pick fall out of my hand? So I have some, some recommendations on picks that I'll talk about a little bit later. But first I just want to get into some of the most common ways to hold your guitar so that it's comfortable and maybe to prevent it from falling out of your hand while you're strumming. Now the biggest thing when holding guitar pick is to remember to keep your wrists relaxed. Most people, you have such a stiff wrist and that's the biggest thing that affects your strumming and the sound of your strumming. So if your strumming is sounding stiff, it means you just need to relax your wrist but not the grip on the pick. Okay, Relax the wrists but not the grip on the pick. So let's talk about our pick grip. Now there's a few different options, but the two favorite that I like to use when I am strumming on my guitar is, is just holding the pick between your thumb and your first finger. All right, so I'm going to show you. All right, so I want you to hold your pick up and down like this. So you'll see it's a teardrop shape. All right. And the point is facing down to the floor and this little area, this fat area is pointing up. Now the pointy area points into the guitar when you're strumming. What I want you to do is I want you to put your thumb flat across the back of the pick and not towards the top. I actually want you to be probably a good portion into that pick. Okay. So you can see just put that thumb horizontally across the pick and I want you to take the first finger and just kind of grab it so that it points down the pick. If you can see that. So we got our thumb goes across the back and the thumb kind of curls around the pick like this. This is how I hold it for strumming. Hey guys, hope you're enjoying this lesson. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and turn on those notific this way. YouTube will let you know when I release more videos just like this one. Now I have a very, I'm mostly self taught on the guitar and because of that I have a very bad habit of sometimes doing this between my thumb and my second finger. You will have a much better strength grip between the first finger in the thumb versus the second finger in the thumb. I can feel it. It's kind of weird. It's just a bad muscle memory that I have from playing guitar on my own for so many years and, and my guitar teacher did try to correct it. So I sometimes flip back and forth. Now, for those of you that have issues with strumming and the pick falling out of your hand, what I would recommend is maybe doing a two finger grip on your pick. So again, hold our pick up, we're going to slide the thumb on the back, we're going to put the first finger and the second finger as reinforcements. So you see, I got both of these fingers and I use this very commonly. Okay. When I am strumming, I do this particularly when I am strumming very fast. Let me show you an example. So if I were doing a slow strumming pattern like this, I would use either my first or my second finger if I'm using my bad habit. But if I start getting really, really fast, and this is where the tendency of the pick to fly out of your hands will happen is when you go to a faster strumming pattern.
Right. A lot of people, they go to do that and the pick goes out of their hands. And trust me, I still drop my pick to this day. So if you're dropping picks, don't worry, it's going to happen for the rest of your life. So by adding the second finger, it gives you a little bit more strength to hold on to that pick with the strumming. The other alternative is you can move to a lighter gauge pick. When I do a lot of really intense strumming, I sometimes move from a 0.88 to a 0.677 thickness pick. And I'll put a video up here that talks about different guitar picks that you can use for acoustic versus electric guitar. And what's the best pick to use for guitar. The other recommendation I have for students who have trouble holding onto their pick is to purchase some Dunlop Max grip picks. We're going to see if we can get a close up here. If not, we'll put an image up here. But these picks have a little bit of a grit coating on them. It almost feels like sandpaper. And they're called Max grip because it really helps you get a really good grip on the pick. So if you're having trouble with holding on to your pick now, the grip is still the same. Okay. If I put these picks down, the grip is still the same. Thumb across the back, one finger or two fingers, whatever works best for you. Okay. If you can do the one finger that's usually the best because it allows you to have more relaxation in the rest of your hand and you would hold it just the same. It's just it feels like sandpaper. So it's got a little bit of an extra grippy on it to make it more comfortable and make it less likely that the pick is going to fall out of your hands and onto the floor. If you guys are interested in learning more about getting started with guitar, I have a completely free guitar crash course. Just go to laurenbateman.com crashcourse and there's a bunch of free lessons there to get you started with playing your first songs on the guitar. I hope you guys enjoyed this video. Make sure to give me a thumbs up. YouTube's gonna pop a couple more videos up over there. Go check those out and I hope to see you guys in another lesson video.
