In this video I'm gonna show you how to strum smoothly using a pick so you can
sound like a pro on your guitar, let's do this.
Hi there, I'm Tomas Michaud from Real Guitar Success where I help you learn
guitar and unleash the musician within. You know, within, in here. You know what I
mean. If you're new here, please subscribe to my channel and click that bill so I can
get you some more great guitar lessons and tutorials. Getting a smooth strum
using a pick can be a little rough at first but if you do know how to get a
good smoother strum you can make some great music even with just a few chords.
The key is knowing how to hold the pick properly in just a couple of simple
techniques. Let's get started with the best ways to hold the pick. I'm going to
show you two different ways to hold the pick. The first way has your palm and
your hand basically parallel to the guitar. The pick sticking out this way
and it strikes along the strings like this. The key to making this work
properly is you're going to strike down and angle
the pick up slightly on the way down and then turn your wrist slightly so on the
way up it slides along the strings on the way up. It's not straight up and down
the whole way that would make a rough sound. This makes it smoother. The other
technique that I can tell you now that will really help is when you tighten up
on the pick, you're actually putting the pick on your first knuckle or your first
finger and then your thumb over it and when you tighten up there roll your
thumb back a little bit so there's more pressure on this part of your thumb than
the first part. It allows us to pick the wiggle a little bit more. So the
combination of wiggling and turning my hands slightly makes for a smooth strum.
Can you see the pic wiggling a little bit? Now if I don't wiggle it and tighten
up and straight up and down it's very rough. If I let it wiggle and angle, it's
smooth.
Now the second technique is to angle your fingers a little bit this way so
that the palm is not exactly parallel to the guitar but your hand is pointed
towards a guitar a little bit. This makes more of a brushing sound
on the guitar and there's a little different style.
Now you're going to want to angle the pick quite a bit to make that work.
You angle on the way down up and on the way. When your hands going up, the pick is
angling down.
And again you don't want to tighten up too hard but have a nice loose hold on
the pic but enough so it won't just fly out of your fingers. You have to tighten
up. People do have problems with it flying out of their fingers. You have to
tighten up enough to hold on to it or you'll be strumming with your fingers.
Now, good way to practice this is just to take a simple chord and try first of all
getting the feel of what makes a harsh sound and what makes a smooth sound. You can see that I've
tighten up a little bit and tighten my wrists as well so its not moving and its trying to get archer. That's even the sound I want some time I
want to dig in. So it's a useful sound but if you want a smooth sound which
most of the time you do, you want to get a feel for how much you tighten to
hold on but still can let the pick wobble. This video is part of a playlist
called Guitar Strumming Lessons. Make sure and subscribe if you want to learn
more about strumming and I'll let you know when more of the videos are live. If
they're already live by the time you've gotten to this place I'll go ahead and
put a card somewhere up there so that it'll direct you to the playlist and you
can go there and check out the videos on the subject that you want to learn about
guitar strumming. Thank you for joining me today. Let me know in the comments if
this video has helped you and if there's something that you'd like me to make a
video lesson on let me know in the comments below and maybe I can help you
out. Until next time