 Ninja PickIf you've ever been to the Guitar Center or shopped online for guitar picks you've likely experienced a healthy dose of overwhelm in the face of seemingly unending options! Picks come in numerous sizes, shapes, thicknesses, textures and are made out of many different materials.
Picking is like any other physical motion involved in playing the guitar in that to optimize results it must be done with as much “economy of motion” as possible. (moving as little as possible to maximize efficiency) Achieving this on the guitar requires both economy of motion and making contact with the strings with the very tip of the pick. If, for example, you have a half inch of pick exposed out beyond your fingers and you strike the string a quarter of an inch beyond the tip, this will dramatically slow down your picking because you have to drag your pick that additional distance. The way this relates to my recommendation for beginners in choosing a pick is as follows: If you use a very small pick (teardrop pick) there can only be a tiny bit of pick exposed beyond your fingers which slashes your margin of error – this is the main reason I suggest beginners should use small picks. It is possible, and many players do this, to have more pick exposed and still only make contact with the tip of the pick and be equally efficient as someone using a small pick. Beyond that consideration, the main points to think about when choosing a pick are the comfort of the pick in your hands and the different tones that different picks make on different strings on different guitars. Not surprisingly, with that many variables, this process requires a lot of trial and error. I recommend you buy a large variety of different picks and compare them to each other on the same guitar.  Beginners often under-appreciate just how difficult it is to play evenly in time but playing in time is as important as any other aspect of playing an instrument because a universal common denominator in all music is time.
Technology has availed both metronomes, drum beat apps and videos with drum beats for free or nearly free. The best free Android metronome I've tried is called “metronome beats”. And for Apple devices, “metronome plus” is great. The first thing to consider when practicing with a metronome/drum beat is volume. Your metronome needs to be louder than you are so that you can clearly hear each click. Another great option to make practicing more pleasant is to play along with drum beats. An advantage of this is that drum beats contain more parts you can take cues from to maintain good timing as compared to a metronome which is typically either clicking in quarter or eighth notes plus it simulates the real world experience of playing with a drummer. YouTube has an incredible number of drum beat backing tracks available and you can specify the genre of music and tempo you'd like, for example: a Chicago blues shuffle at 120 bpm. (beats per minute) Lastly, here's some advice for playing with a metronome: As a beginner, you should practice primarily against quarter notes, that means you will play one note per click of the metronome. Then, when you're consistently good at that, practice playing eighth notes against the metronome in quarter notes and practice quarter notes against the metronome in eighth notes.  Playing the guitar or bass is very much an exercise of coordination or synchronization. Your right hand must be synced with your left hand, your pick must be synced with the strings, your left hand must be synced with the strings and the frets and your playing has to be synced with the band and the tempo.
In the same way that when you tap your foot, it's down on the beat and up on the ands, (the off beat) your pick too should generally be down on the beat and up on the ands, especially when playing eighth notes. This reinforcement of both your foot and pick being down on the beats and up on the ands will eventually lead to a strong sense of where the beat is, which is critical to becoming a competent musician. Alternate picking (picking down and up) needs to be practiced to the point of automaticity. A caveat with picking down on the beat and up on the ands occurs with quarter notes – I recommend that beginners play quarter notes with alternate picking which puts the down picks on beats one and three and the up picks on beats two and four. Once you've gotten to the point of alternate picking being completely subconscious, then you can play slower quarter notes with down pick.  As a frenetic, young musician I was constantly tapping my feet while playing, along with tapping on every surface that sounded remotely interesting everywhere I went. Besides getting yelled at during stage rehearsals in guitar ensemble in college for excessive foot tapping with loud shoes by the director, foot tapping has served me well over the years and it can do the same for you!
Tapping your foot while playing can help you keep better time and will engage you with the music more. As a beginner, it's shockingly difficult to keep good time. (most tend to race) I recommend getting lots of practice tapping along with a metronome or drum beat while practicing/playing. Begin by tapping whichever foot feels more comfortable. Tap in quarter notes or if the tempo is fast, tap in half notes so you don't exhaust your foot. Once you're proficient at that, switch to the other foot and once you're comfortable with that try alternating your feet. You can also do these exercises while standing. A final observation you want to be cognizant of is the idea that when your foot is down, that's playing on the beat and when your foot is up, that's playing on the off beat or syncopation. You count this by saying one, two, three, four when your foot hits the ground and when your foot is at the top you are playing on the “ands” (the and of one, the and of two, the and of three and the and of four).  Tuning is about as fundamental as it gets, in fact it's so important that I would go so far as to say – if you're not in tune – don't play!
The more you play, the longer you play and the closer you attend to sound, the more you will be able to hear finer increments of pitch and because of this, as a beginner, it's common to think you're in tune when you really aren't. If you always play in tune, you'll have a frame of reference so that you can begin to tell when you're out of tune. I'm going to give you a few tuning exercises, I recommend you do at least one per day. After doing the exercises, check how close you've gotten with a tuner (a high quality, clip on tuner) Exercise #1: tuning off of open strings...four of the six open strings can be matched to the adjacent string below at fret number five (the exception is the B string, the matching note on the adjacent string below is at fret number 4) The other exception is the low E, since there is no lower string you can match that string to either the seventh fret of the A string or the second fret of the D string (those E notes are one octave higher than the low E) Exercise #2: comparing fifths fret to open, adjacent strings above... Again, this works for four out of six strings. The B on the G string is the exception, this is at fret number four. Finally the A on the high E string can be matched to the tenth fret of the B string. Exercise #3: tuning open strings to a note two strings higher...The low E will match the D string second fret, the A string will match the G string second fret, the D will match the B string third fret, the G string will match the E string third fret and the B string will match the seventh fret of the high E string. |
AuthorEric Hankinson Archives
August 2024
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