Guitar picks

What are picks?

A guitar pick is a type of plectrum designed for use on a guitar. Over time people have made picks of various materials, including plastic, rubber, felt, tortoiseshell, wood, metal, and stone. They most often take the shape of an acute isosceles triangle with the two equal corners very rounded and the third corner rounded to a lesser extent. This shape is, however, merely one of many used by manufacturers.

How to use picks?

Picks are usually gripped with two fingers—thumb and index—and are played with pointed end facing the strings. However, it's a matter of personal preference and many notable musicians use different grips. For example, Eddie Van Halen holds the pick between his thumb and middle finger; James Hetfield and Steve Morse hold a pick using 3 fingers—thumb, middle and index; Pat Metheny also holds the pick with three fingers but plays using the rounded side of the plectrum. George Lynch also uses the rounded side of the pick. Stevie Ray Vaughan also played with the rounded edge of the pick, citing the fact that the edge allowed more string attack than the tip. His manic, aggressive picking style would wear through pickguards in short order, and wore a groove in his beloved Fender Stratocaster, Number One, over his years of playing. Jimmy Rogers and Freddie King had a special kind of technique utilizing two picks at once. David Persons is known for using old credit cards, cut to the correct size, angle, and thickness and using them without a tip.

The motion of the pick against the string is also a personal choice. George Benson and Dave Mustaine, for example, hold the pick very stiffly between the thumb and index finger, locking the thumb joint and striking with the surface of the pick nearly parallel to the string, for a very positive, articulate, consistent tone. Other guitarists have developed a technique known as circle picking, where the thumb joint is bent on the downstroke, and straightened on the upstroke, causing the tip of the pick to move in a circular pattern. Circle picking can allow greater speed and fluidity. The angle of the pick against the string is also very personal and has a broad range of effects on tone and articulation. Many rock guitarists will use a flourish (called a pick slide or pick scrape) that involves scraping the pick along the length of a round wound string (a round wound string is a string with a coil of round wire wrapped around the outside, used for the heaviest three or four strings on a guitar; this wrapping creates a rippled surface that produces quite a distinct sound when scraped with a pick).

The two chief approaches to picking are alternate picking and economy picking. Alternate picking is when the player strictly alternates each stroke between downstrokes and upstrokes, regardless of changing strings. In economy picking, the player will use the most economical stroke on each note. For example, if the first note is on the fifth string, and the next note is on the fourth string, the pick will use a downstroke on the fifth string, and continue in the same direction to execute a downstroke on the fourth string. The economy picking technique sounds as though it would require more conscious thought to execute it but many guitarists learn it intuitively and find it an effort to use alternate picking. Conversely, some guitarists maintain that the down-up "twitch" motion of alternate picking lends itself to momentum better, and hence trumps economy picking at high speeds.