Picking Tips to Improve Efficiency and Clarity

Hey what's up guys,

For the first post of the blog (the first important one for that matter), I've decided to put up a common lesson for all players to take something from. I'm going to show you today how to improve your picking with a few simple but important tips. I’ll keep it short and hopefully sweet.

Fretting Hand Tips

-       Minimizing the movement of your fretting hand away from the fret board of the guitar while playing notes. You can practice this by playing any scale to a comfortable speed while limiting movement to an absolute necessary amount. When you’re comfortable you can increase the speed. This will improve your picking efficiency.

-       A common error seen among many players is the position of the fingers within the frets. Your fingers should be more towards the next fret (higher fret) than the previous one. Otherwise fret buzz can be caused.

Picking Hand Tips

-       It is important to move only your wrist while picking. Avoid moving your entire arm. This will only slow you down.

-       Don’t leave too much or too less distance between your fingers (which are on the pick) and the tip of the pick. Too much – Ugly Noise!! Too little – Muted Notes!! Find an amount that is comfortable to you but it must avoid the above problems.

-       THE MOST IMPORTANT – Tilt the pick sideways slightly (any side based on your preference, but not forwards or backwards). This can be done by increasing the distance between the thumb and the tip of the pick, or the other fingers on the pick and the tip slightly. This will guarantee smoother picking (unless you know this already :p )

More posts will come your way soon. I’ll leave you guys with two golden rules.

• Practice the right thing.

Do not let yourself make any mistakes while working on technique. Do things very carefully, because there is no point in working a lot on developing a bad habit into a perfect bad habit!

• Start new things very slowly and only speed up when it's perfect.

Speed comes with time and a little help from a metronome, but fast runs must be played smoothly, accurately and clearly or they sound rubbish. The amazing thing about the really technical guitarists like Steve Vai or Eric Johnson is not just how fast they play but how cleanly they play. Slow it down to half or quarter speed and you can hear every note clearly - that is what you should be aiming for. Clarity.

Take care,

Visal Pinto.

BTW looks like the ‘short’ in short and sweet didn’t work out. See you soon.