Hybrid Picking Guitar Technique
Hybrid picking is one of the more beneficial advanced techniques that you can learn on guitar. No other picking style will give you as wide a range of sound possibilities as hybrid picking, and you can use the technique to open up vast new potential in your playing. However, it can be a difficult ability to master and will take a concentrated long term effort, but the results should be worth it for any player looking to add some new sounds to their playing.
The advantage of hybrid picking is that it combines the capabilities of both regular picking with an actual plectrum, and finger picking. This combination allows you to obtain the classic sounds offered by both techniques, and use them simultaneously or one after another. Players who may only be used to using a pick will be able to add the increased arpeggio and chord articulating powers of fingerpicking, while players who usually use only their fingers can add the thicker tone, faster single note picking, and general strumming abilities of a pick.
So now, let’s talk about exactly how this guitar technique is performed. The key to this playing style is holding the pick between your thumb and index finger, which frees up your other three fingers. These fingers will be used to pluck the other strings as necessary. You will sort of have to figure out the best exact way to position your hand and your fingers, as everyone’s hands and guitars are different, but in general, your free fingers should fall pretty naturally onto the adjacent strings.
One of the biggest challenges of the hybrid picking technique is that you have to develop your three weakest and least coordinated fingers to do the complex and rapid finger picking aspects of the style. Unlike classical finger picking, you pinky on your picking hand will be in heavy use, and this may be your least responsive finger if you have never done much picking with it. It will simply take time to develop these fingers to the point where they can work in harmony with each other and the pick you are holding with your first two.
To work on this, start with some simple and slow arpeggio exercises and gradually build up your finger coordination. If you are already an experience finger picker, this may come quickly to you, and if not, it will probably take a while to really start getting it down, but keep at it and it will come soon enough. Start off with an easy up and down arpeggio through four adjacent strings and once you have that down, come up with a slightly more difficult pattern.
Getting the finger picking aspect of hybrid picking down is a challenge, but that’s not all there is to it. Now you have to work on being able to switch between plucking and strumming the strings with a pick and plucking them with your free fingers added in. Hybrid picking doesn’t reveal its true potential until you are able to fluidly mix use of a pick and use of the fingers, so that its hard to tell the difference when listening to your playing.
January 17 2010 05:19 pm | Guitar Technique