Tennyson is author of The Essential Guide to Guitar Virtuosity, which is an excellent ebook we recommend and can be downloaded from guitarspeedsecret.com. He’s just sent us this brand new article on choosing a guitar pick, if you enjoyed reading it then make sure you visit his site!
There are so many different styles and sizes of guitar picks, and of course so many different ways to use guitar picks, but some picks work better for certain jobs on the guitar. Let’s take a look at some of these.
You have thin picks, medium picks, and heavy picks, and any one of these will do for playing guitar, but it also depends on HOW you want to play guitar.
For instance, a lot of beginning guitar players instantly start out with a thin guitar pick. Thin guitar picks work really well for strumming chords on an acoustic guitar, and they also work well for strumming chords fast.
The down fall of the thin guitar pick, is that its not very well suited for picking out individual notes on the guitar. Don’t get me wrong, you can certainly do this with a thin guitar pick, but you’re not going to want to try and play anything fast using a thin pick.
The other downfall with using the thin pick, is that it produces a strong strumming noise when it brushes through the strings. This sound can sometimes over-ride the actual sound of the chords, or can simply be distracting.
Perhaps you like this sound, and it really comes down to a matter of preference. For instance, you may find that this sound adds a lot to the rhythm of a song if you are doing some recording, and then it might even depend on the type of song itself.
Medium guitar picks are a great way to go for beginning guitar players, because as you probably guessed, they are some where in between. Medium guitar picks don’t give you as much of that overruling brush sound that thin picks do, and picking out individual notes is a lot easier at faster speeds.
Medium picks work well for many different styles of music, including rock chords, but if you want to evolve to rock music’s evil step child, heavy metal, then you will probably want to use a heavy guitar pick.
These picks don’t bow down to the resistance that guitar strings put up. In other words, heavy guitar picks break through the extreme tension of the guitar strings, allowing you to play chords or notes and intricate rhythms much faster, and if you are playing a style of music that involves a heavy use of distortion, you’ll be able to get a lot more chunk out of your chords and palm muting with this type of pick.
Final Advice
When in doubt – try ’em all out!
Copyright © 2013 Tennyson Williams. All Rights Reserved.
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