We’ve been stealthily rolling out updates to the Pickslanting Primer to fill in long-standing gaps in its coverage. The first of these, a long-overdue section on pick grip, went up this week. You can check it out right here!
Getting A Grip
The fundamental challenge of holding a guitar pick is actually a much more sophisticated topic than it appears on the surface. Just between the fingers and hand alone, there are a surprising number of variables at play and choices to make. On top of this, there are an array of subtle interactions between the grip itself and the other parts of your technique that it is connected to further up the arm.
For beginners, the sophistication of all these moving parts means that glib advice to use whatever grip “feels natural” ignores the fact that to a beginner, nothing feels natural yet. By contrast, experienced players probably adopted a particular grip early on in their playing career, through a process of trial and error that they may no longer even remember. With the passage of time, the feel of this grip becomes familiar, but the way it interacts with the rest of their technique can remain frustratingly opaque.
We’ve hinted at some of this interaction in these new lessons, so that there will be some mention of concepts like forearm setup, body contact/anchoring, wrist orientation, edge picking, pickslanting, and so on, even though they won’t be formally introduced until later sections. We’re trying to be as concise as we can be here, giving both beginners and experienced players just enough information to make sense of this topic so that they can experiment in a hands-on way with a pick and guitar.
Bite-Sized Learning
We’ve taken everyone’s great feedback into consideration in planning and filming these new sections. The most important design consideration was to keep lesson videos short, limited to a single topic, and whenever possible, to ensure that the topic is present in the title of the video itself. This way, the Primer can also function as a kind of quick online reference or index for key concepts. It’s tedious to scan a one-hour lesson to locate a particular subject of discussion. But scanning a one-page list of video titles is almost instantaneous.
Thanks to the single-topic approach, most of these pick grip chapters are between two and six minutes in length — just long enough to communicate a key concept with a few examples. This modularity also allows us to add more chapters if there are subjects that we missed, or topics we would like to expand upon.
We’ll be adding more sections over the coming months, stepping backwards with an even more introductory overview of different pick designs and some practical tips for choosing one. Compiling a clear, organized, approachable “instruction manual of everything” in the universe of picking technique may not be a small task, but that’s what you pay us for, and we take that mission seriously!
Love the bite-sized nuggets in the Pick Grip update - well done, CTC Team! I like the lengthier CTC talks but the shorter, chapterized approach is very handy to dip into and out of when necessary. Also, it’s great to hear some new terms for pick grip behaviors that honestly didn’t have a name before. How do you guys come up with this stuff?!
Honestly, the same way as everything else — find the obvious stuff that’s not being taught and try to understand it. There’s so little available on pick grip it’s kind of striking, given how many moving parts there are and how many people seem confused by it.
I won’t say we’ve solved any great mysteries here, and I’m sure we got a few things wrong or left stuff out that’s important. (Grip force/strength, I’m looking at you!) But hopefully we’ve provided a starting point for nailing down the parts of this that matter - especially for beginners who have nowhere to start.
As someone who often uses a grip where the last joint of the thumb is bent almost 90 degrees, so that the thumb pressure comes more from the tip of the thumb than the pad of the thumb, I felt personally attacked while watching these. [/sarcasm] Actually there was a time when I was trying to wrap my head around Steve Vai’s main grip, and my thumb and index finger just don’t want to align in a way where I can replicate his thumb posture. Went through the same thing when I attempted to mimic Richie Kotzen’s grip. Anatomy just didn’t cooperate. I can do a “straight thumb” grip resembling lots of your examples, but I see many guys do grips where the last thumb joint (near the tip) is straight, but the second last is bent enough that the bend at that joint is clearly visible. Obviously individual experimentation based on an educated starting point is the way to go, but it always struck me that if I wanted the pick to interface with the string the same way those guys did, I wouldn’t be able to do it using an identical setup to their’s.
So you’re saying it’s more thumb tip to index? That’s a good call, I didn’t include that because we haven’t really seen it, or seen much of it. Is this trailing edge or leading edge?
Pictures of this would be great. Let’s take a look.
Leading edge. And I use this more when I’m trying to do escaped downstrokes or double-escaped stuff, though it can also work with escaped upstrokes.