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 hands?" 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 pick 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 your 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'm strumming on my guitar 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
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i have a ver 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 and 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 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 gonna slide
the thumb on the back we're gonna put the first finger and the second finger as reinforcement
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
all right a lot of people they go to do that and the pick goes right out of their hands and
trust me i still drop my pick to this day so if you're dropping pics 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 .88
to a 0.77 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 backslash crash course 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