Lauren Bateman shows how to hold a guitar pick and which thickness to choose. Thinner picks work best for beginners, while medium or heavier picks suit electric guitar. She demonstrates the grip: thumb across the pick, index knuckle on the back.
Hi, this is Lauren Bateman, owner at LB Music School. And I wanted to take the time to talk to you briefly about a very important part of guitar playing and that is guitar picks. Yay. So there's a bunch of different kinds and types of guitar picks. Over time you'll develop which one you prefer. I'll show you a few that I have here, here. But what I'm going to do is go to a close up to show you how I go about holding a guitar pick, particularly for when I'm strumming. I tend to be a more of a rhythm guitar player. I play acoustic guitar, so I tend to do a lot of strumming. So I'm going to show you a way that I was taught to hold my guitar pick. This way you get a firm grip on the pick and it's kind of comfortable for you. So I'm going to go in for a close up to show you a few different types of guitar picks that I have as well as how to hold your guitar pick. So I'm going to show you. Here are just three different size guitar picks that in terms of size, they're all the standard kind of shape. This kind of teardrop shape. There are guitar picks that are much bigger than this. There are ones that are smaller than this, but I typically like to use this sized guitar pick for my playing. You might like a bigger one, you might like a smaller one, but these tend to work really well. The difference between these three picks that I have in my hand is the thickness. So this orange pick, which says 60 millimeters on here, so it's a very flimsy pick. I can bend it very easy. These flimsier type picks are really good for beginner players because they tend to strum really, really hard.
Ones that I like to use. These are my favorite, these Dunlop Tortex picks. I like to use these. This one is 0.88 millimeters, so a little bit on like the medium to medium heavy side. They also have a yellow1 that's 0.77 that I, that I like a lot. So I kind of tend to play with these ones myself. This one is a bit thicker. This one is 1 millimeter and as you can see compared to this orange one that I had earlier, that you can bend very easily. These thicker picks don't bend quite as easy. They're much stiffer. So when you're strumming they don't have a lot of give to them. I tend to like playing heavier picks like this when I play electric guitar. But I tend to like playing something in the middle when I play my acoustic and do a lot of strumming. For beginners, I recommend using some thinner picks just to have a little bit more give on their strumming in the beginning, since they tend to strum so aggressively. The thing with these thin picks, because they're so flimsy, you'll get a lot of pick noise in your strumming. So for this demonstration, I'm going to use my favorite, and it's also my favorite color, green. So this is the Dunlop Tortex pick. They have a small curve to them. I don't know if you can really see that in the profile there. But what we're gonna do is we're gonna take our thumb and we're gonna put it flat across the fat part. So I'm kind of holding it like this, as you can see. So the fat part of the pick, the thumb goes across.
Then on the back side, while my thumb is still going across the back, I'm going to grab it with my knuckle. So I kind of got this little knuckle thing going on. So kind of got the knuckle pointing down the pick. If I can get my other fingers out of the way, my knuckles pointing down the pick, and I've got my thumb across the back of the pick. Now also, I'm not holding it way back here because it makes it very flimsy in. The pick will fall out of your hand this way. You do it with the thumb across the back. And then you take your first finger, your index finger, and you grip it kind of between your thumb and that bend in your index finger right there. You'll be able to get a really, really good grip on this pick. And depending. I've seen some people, they do like an open hand thing. I tend to like to do a fist that's a little bit more natural since your hand naturally curls. But just repeat. So we've got. Here's our pick with the point facing down. Thumb goes flat across the top. Flip to the backside. We're going to bend our index knuckle and put it on the backside. So that's what we get. So that's how you hold your pick.
This portion of the video is in addition to what I already recorded. I went home and got a couple other different types of picks just to give you a few other ideas. So the ones I showed you were these types of picks. Pretty pretty standard size. I unfortunately don't have any of the oversized picks to show you but I found one of these. This is a max grip pick and if you see up here.
It'S kind of rough and it's a little bit grippy. Some of my students like using this because it helps them get a little bit more of a grip on the pick, especially when they're strumming. And then I do have one of those smaller size jazz picks as well. So just to show you in comparison to these other two picks here. So that's the first pick and there's your green pick. So you can see this pick is a little bit smaller and it has a little bit more of this teardrop shape with the really, really pointy bottom here. Very good for faster playing. I think these are called kind of like your jazz style picks, but. But there's tons of different types of picks, so it's really a personal preference thing and you just need to pick out which one you like best and feels most comfortable for you to play.
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