Guitar Picking Techniques
Flat Picking & String Skipping

Which one do you pick? (groan) Guitar picking techniques are a specialist art to many "pros" of the guitar, and yes, it can get very complex, but once you arm yourself with the key elements and start back at square one correctly, you'll find it much easier to develop picking confidence.

In this lesson we'll cover the key guitar picking techniques. Firstly, make sure you equip yourself with a fairly soft plectrum that can flex over the strings with ease - a hard pick will just make this ten times more difficult than it should be and sound too harsh for this quite delicate style of playing.

Ok, let's get started!...

Guitar Picking Techniques - Warm Up!

This first section outlines the core basics of good picking practise for both acoustic and electric guitar.

Learn to pick with up AND down strokes. Many guitarists that wouldn't class themselves as beginners at all still only seem to want to pick down towards the ground. The idea is to use upstrokes when the sequence travels in that direction, and the same for down strokes.

Listen to the audio below and then look at the diagram...

If you look at the diagram you'll notice we are down picking from the root note down to the skinny E string and then coming back up with, yep, upstrokes.

The general "rule" (it's more of a "make life easier for you" kind of rule when you're starting out) is that the direction of a stroke/pick is determined by where the next string being played in the sequence is. This is directly related to all the following guitar picking techniques.

Keep that "rule" in mind for each section of this lesson and you'll pick things up quicker (pun intended).

At first, your accuracy will seem bad but try not to look at your picking hand - look at the neck instead! A weird tip, but it works.

Onwards and upwards! Let's get to grips with some solid guitar picking techniques...

Basic flat picking technique

Flat picking is basically just plucking the strings of your guitar with a plectrum. The other method is finger picking.

Similar to the warm up, we're going to stick with one chord - A7 - but this time we're going to do some string jumps. This means we'll start as though we're just picking down the chord, but 3 strings in we're going to jump to the top E string to begin our upstrokes.

Take a look and listen...

If you count "1 and 2 and 1 and 2 etc..." your brain should almost naturally begin to separate those two bass notes like in the audio below...

That's what it sounds like stripped down to just those key bass notes.

As long as you keep some sort of strict rhythmic control by identifying a couple of notes that have particular emphasis, you'll be able to wrap the rest of the chord around it using the appropriate up and down picks.

Notice how, like I said before, stroke direction is determined by the position of the next string you play in the sequence to make the travel of your hand smoother.

So we'll start on that A7 chord like before, using that same picking pattern, but this time we'll make it into a progression by moving the shape up the neck.

The tab below shows you where to move up.

Again, I would rather you look at your fretting hand because at least the palm and most of your picking hand is stationary. You will find you can naturally be quite accurate anyway with your picking hand

It doesn't matter if you pick the notes in the wrong order - just make sure you downstroke and upstroke when you should be - if in doubt, stop, take a look at what the next string you play will be - if it's a fatter string, upstroke, if it's a skinnier string, downstroke (unless it's the root string, the lowest bass string of the chord - that's always a downstroke!).

Floating is a technique within flat picking where you play a couple of notes fretted, and the rest open. The open strings should ring out to give some depth to the sequence.

Take a listen...

With floating, select two or three of the bottom, fattest strings at frets 3, 5 and/or 7 and use these as bass notes.

Now, because these notes at those frets are in the key of E minor you can float them up and down the fretboard whilst picking the top skinniest strings. These top 3 strings make up the main part of the E minor chord and will compliment the bass strings played at those frets.

Listen again to the audio - that's what I'm doing in this example.

Experiment with playing strings at different frets and picking some of, or all the other strings around them. You can discover all sorts of wonderful floating chord shapes here.

Floating is about taking 1, 2 or 3 fretted strings and combining them with open strings.

Don't forget those upstroke, downstroke rules too! Well, not rules...you know what I mean.

String skipping picking technique

String skipping is yet another picking technique that is pretty self explanatory.

In a nutshell, string skipping involves jumping, or "skipping" strings whilst up and down stroking. It allows for more creativity, jumping from low to high tones, giving chords more unpredictable patterns.

Take a listen...

You'll notice that the picking follows an alternate pattern, so in the first part I'll pick the bass/root string as usual followed by the E, D and G string, but in the next part I pick E, G and B. This alternate pattern is very common with all guitar picking techniques.

The cross picking part is obvious - the jump from the bass/root string right up to the top string before jumping back down to the D string. The same upstroke/downstroke "rules" apply here too!

Of course, this can be done with chord progressions as well so have a wander around the fretboard with this pattern. Changing chord position whilst you're making that "jump" with your picking can sound really effective if played right...

Picking through more defined chord changes

Floating chord changes as we saw earlier aren't actually big movements in the way of changing your finger formation.

The audio and tab diagram below lay out a picking pattern that weaves through a more obvious chord change.

It's good practice for your accuracy and co-ordination to use this method often, especially when string skipping, because it involves both your picking hand and (more so) your fretting hand making significant movements together and not breaking up the rhythm or accuracy in the process.

Now without the up and down arrow help!

Try this final exercise without reference to the up or down strokes.

Anyway, hope that's been of some use to you! For more lessons, use the links below.

See you soon!