How to Hold a Guitar Pick for Lefties

Video Transcript

"Equally important to strumming is picking and what I'm going to do here is show you how to properly hold the pick. How I do it is simply have my hand almost in a fist, you know, pretty much in a fist like motion and so I might rest my pinky on the a pick guard here. There's different techniques some people have two fingers which is fine, I've seen a lot of great players do that. They have their fingers splayed out, a the classical way to do it or the most commonly accepted way is to play in a fist where you're holding the pick. And you basically use your first part of your digit of your finger here, put the pick like there, almost parallel and then simply place your thumb over like that. And what you're going to do is basically squeeze like that and you know, when you're first starting you'll squeeze harder than you need to, to get comfortable with it, but over time what you're going to do is not have as hard of a grip because less tension you put on the easier it is to maneuver the picking techniques. So basically like this and then you want your pick right over the string with about that much hanging out, you don't want to much pick hanging out. You want as little pick and be light on the string as you can to properly execute picking."