Guitar pick rotating in your fingers no matter what you try? Missing strings, hitting the wrong ones, or just can’t get enough control and accuracy? Fixing how you grip the pick is the most important step you can take.
You know when you hear an amazing guitarist play flawlessly and you just think, “How?!”
It’s actually not some unsolvable mystery. There are a few simple things pros do that you might want to try.
I know it sounds simplistic, but just go with me here.
It’s about how they hold the pick.
They hold it in a way that prevents them from making easy mistakes when picking.
Picking is hard enough, so you might as well do everything you can to minimize your errors.
I just put out a full video walking through this. Watch it here.
Stay Natural
The first step is staying natural. Avoiding an unnatural grip is crucial for good picking.
If you’re holding it in a way that forces you to use too much energy, you’ll always run out of steam and seize up while playing.
So you need to hold it in the most natural way possible.
Take a look at your thumb. That will tell you all you need to know about whether you’re using too much energy.
Look at Stevie Ray Vaughan, Hendrix, Bonamassa, Eric Johnson, and pretty much any other virtuoso player. They all nail this part perfectly. Their hands look natural and relaxed the entire time they’re playing.
Cover The Pick
Step two is covering the pick.
Your thumb position on the pick is huge. A guitar pick rotating in your fingers almost always comes down to this one thing.
If your thumb is in the wrong spot, or the pressure your thumb is applying isn’t evenly distributed, you’re going to have a moving pick, and that spells disaster for your picking.
By applying pressure evenly across the top of the pick, not concentrated in the center, you can fix this problem once and for all.
Let It Flex
Finally, you need to let it flex.
You’ll never find a pro with a death grip on their pick. That’s exactly why pros have such crisp timing and can pick everything so cleanly.
Any great player allows the pick to be light enough between their fingers that it can move a little when pressed against the string.
If you’re squeezing, there’s no way to predict when that pick is going to break through the string. That means your timing gets thrown off constantly and you’ll fumble around the strings.
Missing strings, hitting dead notes, and having poor accuracy are all symptoms of squeezing too hard.
Hold it like you’re holding a bird: strong enough to hang on to it, but light enough that you don’t crush it.
Why Thumb And Index Finger In The First Place
Most players naturally hold the pick between their thumb and index finger, and there’s a real anatomical reason that’s the right call.
These are the two most powerful and dominant fingers in your hand, with the largest range of motion and independent control of any two fingers you’ve got.
The thumb and index finger are inextricably linked anatomically, because humans need to be able to pinch things using only two fingers. That biological need means there’s a specific muscular coupling between these two fingers that you don’t find anywhere else in the hand.
As you apply pressure on the pick with your thumb, your index finger naturally applies pressure back in the opposite direction. They move toward each other, matching pressure. Relieve pressure in one finger and the other will pick up nearly the same amount to keep the grip intact.
That back-and-forth relationship between thumb and index is exactly why paying attention to the pressure between them, and keeping it light and even, is what actually stops a pick from rotating in the first place.
There’s a deeper layer to this too. Once the rotation problem is solved, varying the pressure between your thumb and index finger on purpose is how you control the pick’s angle for different techniques, sweep picking versus alternate picking, for example. That’s a piece of its own, coming soon.
So if you want to stop the pick from moving around in your fingers, or you want to play cleaner, faster, or with more control, give these three tips a try. I promise you they’ll work.
If picking technique like this is something you want broken down further with real tabs and lessons to practice it, that’s exactly what the Hand Mechanics Membership includes for $19 a month.
Max
