Published June 25 on Ezinearticles.com

Guitar picks are tiny, silly seemingly, unimportant tools used to play guitar strings however you might be really surprised how a guitar pick can really boost your performance. It determines your playing style, your tone and speed. If you have a particular sound in mind the right pick is like the icing on the cake. It gives just that bit of extra you need to impress.
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Published June 24 on Ezinearticles.com

Learning to play an instrument is not easy and requires a lot of time and discipline. You want to optimize your practice conditions to learn as fast and easy as possible. A decent standard guitar with a good sound is the first thing you need. Anything less will make learning more difficult, slow down your progress and will make you believe you just don’t have the talent or the discipline or the patience to learn it.

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As soon as we grab something there is pressure involved to hold the object in our hand or between our fingers. The wrist will be locked to help and this is exactly what we want to avoid. Playing any musical intrument requires flexible wrists therefor at all times we must be focussed on relaxing them.

Why? Because they need to make very subtle and fast movements while playing. On holding the guitar pick you want to apply as little pressure as possible holding it to keep a flexible wrist.

The main rule is: Don’t ‘grab’ the pick because you need to press on it in order to not drop it. Instead you will take the pick and lay it on your index finger the tip facing your finger tip Put it slightly further than you finger tip. Lay your thump vertically on top of the pick. This way the pick will stay between thump and index finger with the least amount of pressure when playing.

WRONG

On the picture above the person is holding at the most half the pick between the fingers and thus has to use more pressure in order not to lose the pick when playing.

RIGHT

As you can see only the tip is exposed and this is the only part that plays the string so the rest can be hekd beween he fingers. Holding the pick like this needs only the least amount of pressure.

Jim Dunlop Stubby

Of all picks these are my favorites as they produce
the best tone especially when playing solo. Its tip is sharp and thin. I started off using he small ones(on the right) and later switched to the Big thick Stubby. My taste has changed a bit in the past years and now I use the middle size of he Big Stubby(the middle one on the left picture).

Introduction.

Even with so many tuners on the market you might still find yourself sometimes with no tuner around or one that doesn’t work or the batteries ran out. Tuners are not always a 100% reliable eather. You tuned the guitar and it’s still not in tune. I double check my guitar by checking harmonics and I sometimes need to do some extra adjustment. I do this without any gear and is the final touch to a perfectly tuned guitar.

Rough tuning.

The following are steps to fine tuning. Before we get to this we need to roughly tune each string
to its pitch. It won’t work if the open G string plays F instead of G. Tune it up first as close
as possible towards G. You don’t need absolute pitch to fine tune and the guitar will surely be in tune. Also you need to make sure that string 6 has correct pitch in order to properly hear the harmonic on the fifth fret and because all other strings will be adjusted to it.

Fine tuning.

Frets 5 and 7 on 2 consecutive strings(not string 2 and 3)both produce the same harmonic. On checking both harmonics you should hear one tone.

Example: The harmonic on the low E-String fret 5 produces an E two octaves higher and the same pitch as the open highest string. The harmonic on fret 7 of the A-string produces the same harmonic.

When these 2 harmonics are not the same you will hear a pulse. Its frequency is the difference between the frequencies of both harmonics. So if harmonic in tune is 800hz and the other 810 you will hear a pulse of 10hz. The faster the pulse the bigger the difference in pitch between the two strings. Adjust the next string to the one in tune. The pulse will slow down until you will hear only one tone on playing both harmonics.
Then both strings are in tune and you can move on to he next string. Now you base yourself on string 5 as the one in tune. Play the harmonic on the fifth fret and play the harmonic on the seventh fret of string four.

Note: I actually find it easier to hear the pulse when playing the harmonic of the string that needs to be tuned first.

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