[MUSIC] Now, whether you're playing acoustic guitar or electric guitar, you might choose to use a pick. You might choose to do more fingers style playing, you might choose a combination of both. When you use both the pick and your fingers, it's usually referred to as hybrid picking. One of the things to keep in mind is, as you're playing a new instrument, is to keep in mind the physical limitations that you personally might have. Listen to your body, listen to your hands. If things feel too strenuous over time that might create some kind of injury. You do want to pay special attention. That being said in talking about pick technique which is the first thing we're going to talk about, I've seen a myriad of styles. I've seen people who pick in ways that would be very painful to me and they're amazing players. And so, there's very little in the way of virtuoso tradition when it comes to holding a pick. I'm going to offer you some suggestions, hopefully you'll find them helpful. The first thing I would suggest is holding the pick as if you were holding a key as you would, if you are about to open the key to your house, front door to your house with a key. And you would sort of choke up on the key and hold most of the key in your hand. And it would be more of twisting movement. For the most part, if you use that your sort of foundation or guide, you shouldn't wind up with any injuries. So it's more of a choke upon the pick as much as possible, and more of, sort of a twisting. Most of the motion coming sort of from your wrist area versus your hand area, or even your fingers. So for the most part when you're using a pick and you make choose any number of picks that are out there, that are available. I choose some pretty heavy picks. And they're sort of very thick, and they're actually made of, I think this is a bone of some kind. Anyway, [SOUND] the pick determines a lot of times what kind of tone you wind up with. [MUSIC] So you may want to spend some time experimenting with different types of picks and finding one that you think creates the kind of voice for you on guitar, whether you're playing acoustic or electric. There are a couple of different ways to use a pick, and I'm going to start off by using open strings and grasping the pick, choking up on it. So, that only a little bit is showing and I'm going to do what's called the downstroke, typical downstroke is. [SOUND] Like that. [SOUND] Now, I'm playing the sixth string which is the E string. I'm going to do a little exercise here, that you can practice and it's just a series of downstrokes on all of the strings played consecutively, backwards from six to one. So you can try some downstrokes like this. [MUSIC] And then in reverse order or in, from one to six now. [MUSIC] Now those are all downstrokes. Very important as you're developing the basic pick technique to grab yourself a little metronome here. And we're going to switch that on and we're going to do downstrokes. want to set my metronome not too fast I'm going to set it roughly, let's say 63 beats per minute and then I'll going to do downstrokes for every click. So, here we go. [MUSIC] Now, in time, you can slowly speed up your metronome to where you get to a higher speed and you're much more comfortable doing that. Now, another style of picking that is really important to learn is what's called alternate picking. So that means that it's a combination of a downstroke and an upstroke. So now, we're going to teach you how to do an upstroke, and it's exact the opposite of a downstroke, and it sounds like this. And I'm going to do it in time with the metronome too, so here we go. [MUSIC] So those are our upstrokes. Now we're going to actually put them together to create the alternate picking. So now we're going to do two strokes on each string, one down, one up, and that's called alternate picking. I'm going to speed my metronome up a little bit So here we go alternate picking two strokes for each string. [MUSIC] [SOUND] Now we're going to keep our metronome going. And we're actually going to do three notes per string. We're going to keep the alternate pattern going, so we're going to go up, down, up, down as we switch to the other string. [SOUND] So here we go. [MUSIC] Now we're going to do alternate picking, four notes per string. We're going to speed up a little. [SOUND] I'm actually going to use this. Let's speed up a lot here. [MUSIC] So as you're practicing this picking technique exercises, work closely with the metronome, and very slowly, incrementally, just inch it up everyday to where you can actually handle faster tempos. The idea is that you're still trying to preserve some of the accuracy of which you're playing the notes at the slowest speeds. And so eventually you can get to higher tempos and practice. And maybe, say this is four notes string. [MUSIC]
