How to Clean Up Your Picking Technique | Blackstar Potential Lesson

Duration: 2:33 506 transcript words EN summary

Video summary

Controlling your picking hand is a fundamental skill that significantly impacts the tightness and articulation of your guitar sound, especially as you transition from basic chord strumming to more complex single-note riffs and solos. Beginners often fall into the trap of using exaggerated movements when playing individual notes, which leads to inefficiency and a lack of precision. To correct this, you should focus on minimizing the travel distance of your picking hand; instead of large arcs that move far away from the strings, aim to keep the pick close to the instrument and restrict its motion to just either side of the string being played. This approach ensures that your technique remains efficient and allows for smoother execution of faster passages. In addition to managing the physical movement of your hand, it is crucial to be mindful of the intensity with which you strike the strings, as operating at the extremes of volume can severely limit your dynamic range. Picking either too quietly or too aggressively results in a one-dimensional sound that lacks nuance and expression. The ideal practice involves finding a middle ground in terms of picking force, which provides you with sufficient "headroom" to increase volume when needed for emphasis or decrease it for subtlety. By avoiding these extremes during the early stages of your playing career, you establish a versatile foundation that allows for greater musical control and emotional depth in your performance. Combining these two principles—restricted hand movement and balanced picking intensity—creates a technique that is not only cleaner but also highly dynamic and responsive to musical context. When you dial in these adjustments early on, the benefits compound over time, making it easier to tackle advanced techniques without developing bad habits that are difficult to break later. Ultimately, refining your picking hand through these simple yet effective methods will serve you well throughout your musical journey, enabling you to produce a sound that is both articulate and expressive across various genres and styles.

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[music] >> Controlling your picking hand is one of the things that will make the biggest difference to how tight and articulate your sound is as a guitar player. Now, as a beginning guitar player, there are many easy pitfalls to fall into with how to correctly pick. When we first start out, we often learn chords and then we tend to just strum all the strings at once, which is a good starting point for being a guitar player. But, when you then start to dive into single note riffs, scales, or even guitar solos, we need to tighten this hand up and actually make it a little bit more efficient with what it's doing and what it's hitting. We don't want to be hitting all six strings at the same time when really we just need to be hearing one note. And there's a couple of very simple things we can just keep in mind as we work through the process to ensure that our picking hand stays in check. So, the first thing that we should focus on is how far we're moving our picking hand. So, if you're playing a single note, I'm just going to use the fifth fret on the G here as an example. What I don't want to be doing is this. >> [music] >> Because by doing that, I'm moving way too much and my movement is inefficient. What I actually want to be doing is this. >> [music] >> So, you can see that my hand is actually hardly moving. So, when you're picking single notes, just try and focus on moving just either side of the string. You don't want to be doing these exaggerated big movements. Keep the pick close, keep it tight, and that will make your picking smoother and way more efficient. The second thing is to be mindful of how hard or soft you're actually picking. The guitar is a very dynamic instrument, but we can operate at the extremes by picking too quiet or too loud like this. >> [music] >> Now, those two signals are very different. One is super quiet, one is super hot and aggressive. Now, the best practice for picking is to try and find that middle ground. So, if you can pick somewhere in the middle of that intensity spectrum like this, what that does is it gives you room to go down >> [music] >> and room to go up. >> [music] >> You don't want to be operating at the extremes of this because your picking is going to end up sounding very one-dimensional. So, try and find that middle spot and then you've got headroom both directions to improve your picking. A combination of these two things will make your picking so much more efficient, so much more cleaner, and so much more dynamic. So, try that out yourself. It will serve you so well in the long run if you dial in your picking hand in the early stages of playing.