Lauren Bateman shows two beginner ways to hold a pick: thumb flat with index finger looped around it for security, or thumb with index and middle finger on the pick for comfort during aggressive strumming. One feels awkward, one feels loose, so try both.
Hey, guitar enthusiasts, welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to be going over how to properly hold your guitar pick. Let's get into it.
Now, if you're just getting started with a guitar, learning how to hold your guitar pick properly can be very helpful and can be the difference between, you know, holding onto the guitar pick and having it fall out of your hand onto the floor. So going to give you two different variations here. This is more for beginner type style playing. There are different ways to manipulate and hold your pick down the road if you're getting more into electric guitar and lead guitar playing. But for this video, I'm just going to go over two basic positions that you can use, and I want you to use whatever is most comfortable for you. Now, the first position I'm going to show you is a way that my guitar teacher taught me how to hold the guitar. And the second one I'm going to show you is a way I kind of adapted to adjust for my playing as a guitar player. So what I want you to do is get your pick and you're going to hold the pick so that the point is pointing down. So guitar picks are a teardrop, okay? And we want the point to be pointing down to the ground. So what you want to do is you want to take your thumb and you want to put it flat against the back of the pick, the fat part. So it's like right this horizontal across the pick. Okay? And then what you're going to do is you're going to take your index finger and you're going to loop it around the pick. Okay? So let me show that again. You're going to take your thumb horizontally across the back, index finger, loop it around the pick so that your knuckles almost going down the pick. Let me show you guys in a closeup right now how to do that. All right, so here it is up close again. Thumb across the back. And then we're going to take our index finger and we're going to loop it around. Same thing. If you're left handed, you would just hold it with your other hand, thumb across the back, and then loop that first finger around. Okay. Hope you guys are enjoying this video so far. Don't forget to subscribe to the channel and turn on your notifications this way. YouTube lets you know when I release more video. Now, the pro of holding your pick like this is that you can actually get a really good grip. You can really grip the thumb, thumb around that index finger. So it's really, really great if you're Going to be doing some picking work. Okay. If you're gonna be doing some picking work. And it's also good for strumming as well, you won't feel like the pick's gonna fall out of your hand as much. The downside is I do find this one to be a little bit awkward sometimes, but this was the way that my guitar teacher really tried to get me to hold the pick as being like the proper way of holding your guitar pick. Now some of you may know my story and that I am mostly a self taught guitarist. So I actually developed some bad habits in the beginning. Hopefully you guys are getting instruction here, so you're not going to develop those bad habits. But I have the bad habit of holding my guitar pick with my second finger and that's why my guitar teacher was really hammering in on me. Like, Lauren, you can't hold your guitar pick that way. That's not the right way to do it. But just out of bad habit, I sometimes still use my second finger. So I'm going to show you a second option that I particularly like to use when I have a lot of strumming. And I think it's just a little bit more comfortable for me to hold strumming wise. So we're going to start out the same. The thumb's no different. We're going across the back of the guitar. But what we're going to do is instead of curling the first finger around, we're just going to place the first finger gently on the pick and the second finger behind it. So it almost looks like this, how you're holding the guitar pick. So you've got two fingers on the pick so it is an extra grip.
And for me, I found when I was doing really, really aggressive strumming.
It was nice to have the leverage of that second finger on the guitar pick. So let me show you guys this one on a close up. Again, we're going to hold the pick thumb across the back and just kind of place almost on the fingertips here, the guitar pick in your hand. So we're going to hold the guitar pick like this. Again, if you're lefty, you would take your thumb across the back and just place the two fingers here. Now when I'm playing, depending on how much strumming I'm doing, sometimes I only use one finger on the pick and it's my bad habit. I will still tend to hold the pick with the second finger. But if you can get in the good habit of using your first finger when you're not doing really aggressive strumming. You can have a nice loose grip on the on the pick with this type of pick holding technique I guess. And then if you get into the strumming more, just add the second finger as a little extra support.
The reason I like holding the guitar pick this way is I feel like I can have a looser grip on the pick. But you do run the risk, looser grip of the pick falling out of your hand. And if you guys have issues with guitar picks falling out of your hand, you can watch my video up here where I make suggestions on how you can fix that in your playing. If you guys enjoyed this guitar lesson, I just want to let you know I do have a free guitar crash course that kind of gets you up and running with playing the guitar. In about 14 days we'll go over some chords, some basic strumming, more of this stuff here. So if you're interested in going and checking that out, I'll put a link in the description below.
