Five Critical Reasons To Work On Your Picking Hand

It takes two hands to play the guitar. 

Everyone wants to play with a lightning-fast fretting hand; it’s a classic rock star aesthetic. This will only be an aesthetic if you don’t also work on your picking hand.

In your first few guitar lessons, you will have learned to keep your hands working together as you pick notes and strum chords.

However, a lot of players start focusing on their fretting hand too heavily once they get the basics of picking hand technique down.

Beginners – get into the habit of practicing picking and strumming technique as much as you practice your chords, scales, and riffs. It WILL pay off huge.

Intermediates – Don’t be a player that impresses, be a player that expresses.

Players of every level, take your playing to the next level up by training your picking hand in these areas.

1) Note Accuracy

When learning a solo, or a pattern, or even an intricate strumming pattern, start slow, and focus on picking or strumming each string accurately. This will imrove your tone, and clean up the overall sound of your playing by eliminating unwanted notes and noises.

If you are learning your first chords, keep in mind the strings that shouldn’t be strummed. 

For example, when playing an open Dmaj chord, don’t strum the open E or A strings.  It will mark these strings with “X” on your chord chart.

If you can succeed at avoiding these open strings with your strumming hand, your Dmaj chord will sound much cleaner, and much easier to listen to.

When you are learning a guitar solo (or writing your own), focus on picking each note accurately.

Again, avoiding unwanted strings and noises will make your playing sound much cleaner, and you will start to sound more like a professional guitarist.

2) Timing

This goes along with note accuracy. 

Your playing must be locked in with the drummer. 

Following a drummer is easy enough, but there isn’t always a drummer around.

You can feel it when a player speeds up or slows down, especially during guitar solos. 

If you practice your picking and strumming to a metronome, your sense of time will drastically improve. You will be less likely to slow down or speed up, and counting your way through a song will happen subconsciously.

Similarly, practicing basic picking and strumming rhythms to a metronome will improve your improvisation.

3) Rhythms

Interesting rhythms are the key factor to any great guitar part. They can be simple and catchy or complicated and impressive. 

Some guitarists try to dress up their solos and rhythm parts by simply playing fast. This may impress at first, but it gets old really quickly.  

Whatever style you play, incorporating interesting polyrhythms to your soloing and strumming will up your guitar game in no time. 

Try this exercise I like to call the “one-note guitar solo”. 

Find yourself a good jam track in the style of your choice (they can be found with a quick google or Youtube search), and start improvising a guitar solo. 

There’s a catch; you can only play one note in your fretting hand. Yes, keep your fretting hand in one place, and let your picking hand do all of the work. 

Now the quality of your solo is up to the rhythms you play on that one note. 

Now, take that interesting rhythm, start the song again, and apply it to more notes in your fretting hand. 

This is a great way to take your rhythms to the next level, and overpower the shredder who’s playing all straight sixteenth notes.

4) Dynamics

Dynamics – Loud and soft, and everything in between.

This is another very simple way to elevate your guitar solos and strumming patterns.

Blues guitarists are masters of dynamics. 

The blues are a pretty simple genre. Musically, it tends to be built around a very simple selection of notes; the major/minor pentatonic scale or the major/minor blues scale.

Why not branch out? Some guitarists do, but the root of blues music is built on extreme dynamics. The best players will take a solo from very soft to very loud. This builds intensity, which is felt by the audience. 

If you want to play a memorable guitar part, give the audience something they can feel. 

For beginners, start by simply strumming at a soft volume, a medium volume, and a loud volume. Continue to think about note accuracy when strumming loud, you don’t want to lose control of the instrument!

This is another great exercise for intermediates. 

Take those three levels of intensity: Soft, Medium, and Loud. Pick a simple scale that you are very comfortable with. Improvise a solo at a soft level of intensity for about thirty seconds, then medium for another thirty seconds, then LOUD for another thirty seconds. Make sure your soft playing is very soft, and your loud playing is very loud.

*Don’t change the volume of your amp, the volume changes must come solely from your picking hand.

Building up your solos this way is like telling a great story. Start with something soft, simple, and intriguing, build up the tension but slowly getting louder and faster, then bring the solo to a climax and play at your loudest. 

This will give your playing impact. 

You can apply similar principals to strumming as well. When playing a song, listen to the parts that are quieter, and learn to effectively play them quietly. Then do the same with the loud parts of the song. Learn how to strum with the intensity of a storyteller.

5) Multitasking

When you’ve got your basic technique down, you can start to get ambitious with your picking hand.

One of the top guitarists in the world, Tommy Emmanuel, plays with finger picks.

Fingerpicks attach to your fingers, giving you multiple picks to play with at once. Emmanuel will use his picks to play a bass line, rhythm parts, and a melody all at once.

This virtuosic multitasking, mixed with his musical prowess, make Emmanuel virtually untouchable by any other guitar player in any genre. 

He wouldn’t be able to do this if it wasn’t for the power of his picking hand. 

Push your strumming hand to the limit by learning to play many notes at once. It takes a lot of practice, but the possibilities will be endless in terms of playing any song and ripping mad guitar solos.

For an easy start, try learning the song “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac. This is a fingerpicking classic, with a simple, steady pattern throughout.

Your fretting hand may be able to move quickly, but it is all for not if you don’t work your picking/strumming hand. 

Improve your playing with note accuracy, good timing, interesting rhythms, strong dynamics, and fingers that can multitask. 

Turn yourself from a player that impresses to a player that expresses.