How To Strum With A Pick Like A Pro: Essential Tips for Beginner Guitarists

I'm going to be going through how to strum your guitar with a pick today. And that sounds like a very simple task, but there's actually a lot that goes into using your pick so that your guitar actually sounds good or it doesn't sound like nails on a chalkboard. Now, a lot of students focus on their fretting hand because we want the chords to sound good. Because if the chords don't sound good, the music doesn't necessarily sound good. But I find a lot of students completely ignore the their strumming him, which is why I feel this video is so important for anyone, even if you've been playing guitar for a little while. So I'm going to be giving you some tips on holding your pick that will hopefully make your guitar sound better as soon as today. But I'll also be going over a little exercise to help you with your strumming and your timing. Because most of my students, that's one of the hardest things they have trouble with is timing. And that's super important if you want to play music with other others. So let's get into it.

So let's talk about the pick itself. And if you're in the uk, I've often heard it called the plectrum. The pick itself, There are so many variations to guitar picks, and that's because it's a very personal preference, and I've developed mine over the years. But I have a very specific pick I typically recommend especially especially for beginners. So this pick I have here that has my logo on it, this is what we call a medium sized pick. This is a Dunlop Tortex pick, 0.77 millimeters. It's a little bit in the middle, and I love it for strumming. But for beginners, it's not the best. Typically for beginners, I recommend a thin pick. All right, look how flexible this is. Okay. I can just flick this pick. All right. And this is a 50 millimeter. Okay. You can get them as thin as 0.43. I wouldn't probably go much thinner than that because they tend to break easier. But you can see how flexible it is. And why is this important? So as a beginner, our strumming hand tends to be really, really stiff. So the pick allows the flexibility for the strings to actually ring out.

Okay, I'm going to go back to my thicker pick just so you can hear the difference. I'm going to play really. I'm going to play like most beginners play, really, really stiff in the hand and in the wrist. This is what it's going to sound like.

You can hear the strings just snapping. And a lot of students are like, why does it sound so bad? It's because your wrist is just a little bit stiff. But if I switch over to the thinner pick, I'm going to use the same amount of pressure that I just used. Here's what it's going to sound like.

Sounds already a lot better. And all I did was just change the thickness of the pick. So if you're a beginner, start off with, you know, 0.43 millimeters, 0.55 millimeters, and as your hand loosens up, then you can graduate to the thicker picks. Another pick I want to mention is the Max Grip picks. I have so many students, like Lauren, I'm strumming, and then my, you know, the pick ends up in the sound hole. The pick ends up on the floor. And don't worry, I've been playing guitar for 20 years. I still drop my pick on the floor from time to time. It happens. But these Max Grip picks, they feel like sandpaper on the back. All right, these are Dunlop Max Grip, but they make these in very thin or even thicker as well. But it, like, I can't pull. I'm really trying to pull this pick out of my hand. I can't because it feels like sandpaper. So a lot of my students really, really love this. And the final pick I'm going to recommend especially for my students who have arthritis. Especially if I have arthritis in the thumb, it can sometimes be hard to hold onto the pick. So this is a Black Mountain pick. It's a thin pick, and you can see it has a spring on it. This is more designed for finger picking, but I've often found for my students who are older that have arthritis and have a hard time holding onto the pick that they can use this.

I don't even have to hold the pick. It stays on my hand. So it's a great option, especially if you're an older learner, because most of my students are in, like, their 60s, 70s, and 80s. So we start having to deal a little bit with arthritis coming into the joints and stuff. So this is a great option for students who. Who have arthritis. It's called the Black Mountain pick, and this is their. Their thin pick. So we talked about the different types of picks, but, Lauren, how do I hold the pick? All right, what's the best way to hold it so it doesn't fall out of my hand? I don't have the Max Gray grip picks yet. Or I don't have the Black Mountain pick yet. How do I hold the pick? There's different ways to hold the pick depending on what you're doing. Now I'm going to talk mainly about strumming. Okay. Because if I were playing lead guitar, I would hold the pick slightly differently. But we're on acoustic here and I'm going to be showing you some strumming. So we're going to talk about the way to hold it with strumming. So ideally what we want to do is our picks are teardrop shape. Okay. They're teardrop. And I want to take the thumb and I want to go across the back of the pick. And notice I'm kind of in the middle of the pick. I'm not holding it at the tip. Okay. I'm not holding it at the top here. I'm right in the middle of that pick, kind of like where my logo is. Okay. And I'm putting my thumb right across where my logo is. And then there's a few things you can do here. Okay. My guitar teacher wanted me to do it this way where you curl the first finger around the pick. Again, this is really great. This is probably how I would hold it if I were playing.

You know, lead guitar and doing scales, I would do that. For strumming though, you can do it and I know a lot of people who do. For me, it's not the most comfortable. So that's option one, thumb across the back. Wrap the index finger around almost so that your knuckle pointing down the tip of the guitar. Okay. That's number one how I like to hold it. And I'm mostly self taught. Okay. I don't have a degree in music. I'm just like you. And I kind of played around with what worked for me. So you will sometimes see me alternate between holding my pick with the first finger, the second finger, or sometimes both fingers. So I'm going to show you. The thumb is the same. The thumb goes across the back. And then I would just put the first finger on as if it's pointing down a little bit down that teardrop. And then that's my strum.

Sometimes I will hold it with my second finger.

And if I'm really getting aggressive, I will hold it with both fingers.

Because I don't want that pick to fall on the floor. And the more strumming you do, the more aggressive. The more pressure that goes on the pick, the more likely it will fall out. So those are my options for holding a pick. I want you and I'm giving you multiple because everyone's hand is different. Okay. They say there's more than one way to skin a cat. So you put your thumb across the back. You're either going to loop your first finger around. Okay. I really like this for electric guitar, lead guitar, playing, solos, picking. But for strumming, I prefer to have my first finger extended a bit more or my second finger or both. Okay. And it's a muscle memory thing, so it doesn't really matter if I do my first or second. When I was learning guitar, I mostly held it between my thumb and my second finger. That was my bad habit, being mostly self taught. But it works, it's comfortable for me. And like I said, sometimes I'll hold it with both fingers, especially if I'm doing a lot of aggressive strumming. This is how I like to hold my pick. Now, one of the biggest things that we've already talked about is when you're holding your pick.

Oh.

Try not to hold it in a tight fist. Your hand is loose. Watch my hand. It's like a whip. Okay. Watch my hand. It's a whip. You can see my fingers are open. It's relaxed. And like I said, most beginners.

We'Re doing this in the beginning. We have this tight fist. Breathe, relax. Strumming is all about relaxation. It should act like a whip. And that's the goal. Now that's not going to happen in the beginning. And if it's not happening right away, don't worry. Your hand will naturally relax as you strum more and more. Now, how do we keep the pick from falling out of our hands? I've talked about that a little bit, how I like to grab onto the pick. But the reason we talked about this earlier, pick. So the pick actually has some give to it. Okay. What happens is as your hand gets more relaxed, your wrist is actually going to naturally incorporate that bend. So you can use a stiffer pick because the pick, if you watch my hand, I'm going to exaggerate a little bit so you can see it. Let's go to that close up video. You're going to see my wrist. I'm over exaggerating just so you can see my pick is doing this.

Okay. It's not staying. I mean, it kind of is staying stiff, but I've got enough flexibility in my wrist that the pick is naturally doing this because I have a more relaxed grip. So it allows the pick to move in between my fingers. Now this is like walking a tightrope because if you hold it too loosely, the pick's gonna fall on the floor or the pick's gonna fall inside your guitar and you're never gonna find it again. Right? So if you've had the pick fall in your guitar, let me know in the comments. Trust me, it happens to everyone. And what we're doing is with that looseness, it's replicating what the thin pick does. Because when you use the thin pick, you can't, you can't give any flexibility to the pick because it's going to fall on the floor. So the pick has the flexibility built into it. But once you get better at strumming, your wrist and your grip will allow for the pick to move like this, up and down. Okay, so we're not death gripping the pick. We're never death gripping the pick to try and get it to fall out. Like I said, you're going to have to hold onto it a little bit tighter if you do more aggressive strumming. But I'm never doing this with the pick. Alright? So I just scooched myself in a little bit because I want you to see my elbow when we are strumming. A lot of it, as you can see, is coming from my wrist. I am not strumming with my elbow. Right, you see that?

And again, this is something beginners do. They strum a lot with their elbow because again, that wrist is so stiff. But you can see my strumming. I mean, the elbows move in a little bit, but I'm not doing this with the elbow. So a lot of the strumming comes from the wrist, as I mentioned before, versus the actual elbow. And ideally, when you're strumming, you. You want to be over the sound hole of your guitar. That's where you're going to get the best sound. So if you're a little bit too far back, you might have a guitar that's too big for you. And if you're a little bit too far up here, you might have a guitar that's just a little bit too small for you. So you want to find a guitar where your hand kind of sits right over that. You can see in my video, my hand is right over the sound hole. That's where you're going to get. Because you're going to get different sounds.

Depending on where you play and pick the guitar. But right over the sound hole is kind of the best, the best spot for strumming. Now what about up strums? This is a question I get asked all the time because people, they tend to get Those jerky motions on the up strum. Okay, now the up strum. What we do for that is, again, you have to relax. Those jerky movements are coming from you tensing. But when I show people strumming. So one of the first drumming patterns I show students is just basically four down strums.

1, 2, 3, 4. 1, 2, 3, four.

I'm just playing a G chord over here on my frettingham. Now, if you notice, every time I do a down strum, what's my hand have to do? My hand has to come back up.

Okay?

So I tell students, like, you're already doing an up strum. It's just now you're paying attention to it, okay? And when you start thinking about things, it starts screwing you up. Okay? Whenever we start thinking, that's when we mess up. Okay? Now counting is great.

Okay? 1, 2, 3, 4.

And notice I'm just relaxing. I'm not forcing my hand up. I'm relaxing the hand up. So now if we just hit the strings on the way up, now we got an up strum. Okay? The only thing you have to do is you just have to hold on to your pick. Okay, now up strum. Students ask me all the time, Lauren, do you hit all the strings? Now, when you're strumming and up strumming, you probably. You might not catch the top couple strings. You'll have more of a treble sound, a brighter sound to your up strums. But something that's very important that a lot of students do on the up strums is they strum away from the guitar. Okay? So you want to strum up through the strings. You don't want to strum away from the strings. Okay? I don't know why some students do that, but there's some students, they strum away from the strings, okay? So we always want to strum through the strings. Okay? You don't have to go around them. You can go right through them. Because the pick is gonna move to accommodate for the string. So just kind of gliding over. If you can hear. Listen to my pick.

I'm doing that very slowly. You can hear it gliding over the strings Here. Listen to that again.

Okay, now if I go faster.

That's what it's doing in fast. So you can hear the pick kind of gliding over the strings. I'm not adjusting my hand away from the guitar at all. It's staying in the same plane. Okay? So keep that in mind when you're strumming. So we're gonna do a quick Little exercise. And I just talked about it a little bit already. So we're gonna go between down strums and up strums, down strums and up strums. So the first strumming pattern. And now we'll do an E minor chord, since that's an easy chord for a lot of students. And we're just gonna do four down strums.

One, two, three, four. One, two, three, Four.

Okay. Keep strumming with me as I talk. Okay.

One, two, three, 4.

So what we're gonna do is we have this quarter note strumming pattern. And this is something that's very hard for students to do. We're gonna add the up strums in the middle.

Okay. So we go 1, 2, 3, 4.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And 1, 2, 3, 4. 1 and 2, 3 and 4.

So let me explain what I was doing here because this is a great exercise to work on timing, work on your counting and working on relaxing the strumming hand. Okay, so we have what's called a quarter note strum. 1, 2, 3, 4. Those are your down strums. We call that in music the downbeat. That's why we're doing down strums. All right. What comes in between is the upbeat or the up strum. Okay. Hopefully that makes sense. So downbeat, downstrom, upbeat up strum. Okay. And we're going to start by getting our timing on the quarters, because if we can lock that in, then the ups just have to go right in between. But what happens is I have students. We're going to go quarter note, eighth note, quarter note, eighth note, quarter Note, eighth note, quarter note, 8th note. Sometimes it's tricky for people to go between the two timings, especially when they throw in the up strums. All right. It starts kind of throwing, especially you get a tight wrist, things go a little bit wonky. So that's what we're going to do right now. We're just going to go back and forth a few times. Quarter note, 8th notes and 8th notes are counted. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and. Alright, so we got 1, 2, 3, 4.

1, 2, 3, four.

1 and 2 and 3 and four.

And 1, 2, 3, 4.

1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

And 1, 2, 3, 4 dot 1.

And 2 and 3. And on your own.

1, 2, 3, 4. 1 and 2, 3 and 4. And don't forget to breathe. Breathing will help you relax.

Two more times.

Ready? 1, 2, 3, 1 and 2 and 3 and 4.

And.

If you really want to take your strumming to the next level. I highly recommend you watch my video over there where I'm going to show you how to take that eighth note rhythm I just showed you and turn it into seven different styles of strumming. Go check that out right over there.