Quick: what’s the most influential guitar pick design of all time? You can picture it: the elongated, isosceles triangle shape, with the flat top and the rounded over point. That’s just… you know, a guitar pick, right?
It’s more than that. It’s the model 351, a design that guitar pick industry pioneers the D’Andrea company produced in the 1920s by way of collaboration with another guitar pioneer, Nick Lucas. This is how that all happened:
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One of our top priorities this year is improving our intro tutorial material to cover even more fundamentals of guitar picking and technique. To that end, the Pickslanting Primer now has an awesome introduction to the tools we as players use most intimately: guitar picks!
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Unfortunately for us guitar players, abrasion is a fact of life for most materials that guitar picks are made from. And that means your favorite pick’s character may change as you use it. In fact, you might not even like a pick fresh out of the bag, but at some sweet spot in between fresh and worn. Welcome to the struggle!
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How much technique do you need to be a world-class player? To play convincing bebop, for example, with its signature twists, turns, and arpeggiated ornaments, you’d surely need the ability to make any string change at any moment, at any speed, preferably with alternate picking.
But what if the best jazz players don’t really play that way? What if, like the rest of us, they too must contend with the things their techniques both do and don’t do? And what if the difference between their workarounds and ours is that they don’t think of them as workarounds?
A forum user recently posed the following great question about practice time, and how much of it our interview subjects say they did:
Read MoreTroy, just curious since you’ve interviewed so many world class players. Have you interviewed anyone who has not put in 8+ hours a day practice at some point in their career? It seems that almost everyone I’ve researched with extraordinary technique has put in these type of hours at some point. Usually in their teen years. Just wondering if you’ve run into anyone who hasn’t. Thanks!
Sometimes when I have a few minutes of downtime, I toy around with trying to do the Eddie Van Halen tremolo technique. This is the awesomely beautiful and deservedly famous pure forearm rotation motion Ed uses for the famous Kreutzer etude section in Eruption, and for the mesmerizing tremolo section in the acoustic “Little Guitars” intro.
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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!
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Martin Miller’s spectacular alternate picking technique is probably one of the most-discussed playing techniques we’ve filmed. And it was initially also one of the stealthiest, invisible not just to us but also to Martin himself. Wait, what? Read More
My girlfriend is a violinist who has been playing mandolin the past couple years. So we have a very nice-sounding bowlback classical mandolin sitting in the living room which I will pick up once in a while — maybe every couple weeks. And the technique does seem to be coming along despite very little specific focus on it. Here’s a section of the presto from Bach’s first violin sonata in G minor: Read More
The wrist is one of the most important and commonly used joints in guitar playing. And yet, when it comes to popular guitar teaching, its function has been almost entirely overlooked. When it is addressed at all, it’s usually by way of clumsy analogies like “knocking on a door” or “shaking hands” that are so imprecise as to be mostly useless in teaching players how they’re supposed to move. Read More
