Picking, Plucking, Striking or bouncing the strings?

Picking, Plucking, Striking or bouncing the strings?

In this dispatch we will be looking at a possible 3rd way you could take when striking the guitar strings.

For many years, I’ve advocated the varied tones you can get from experimenting with picks. Finding the right pick type for you should be as important as looking for that elusive new overdrive pedal or delay, different picks and picking approaches will also make you play the guitar in a different way expanding your musical vocabulary.

I, like many players, have favoured the Jazz III picks for most of my playing, honing in on the harder ultex varity. For acoustic or softer playing I tend to go for the Dunlop standard size orange picks (.60mm I think)

However, my ways (and yours) may be about to change. On my travels in a small town called, Biougra in Morocco I was introduced to a local musician Abdelilah to jam, play and find out a bit more about Moroccan music, he started to play fingerstyle, we chatted a bit, then he said he would show me some Amazigh tunes, at which point from his wallet he pulled his guitar “pick”. This pick however, was not a shop bought Dunlop but a modified cable tie. In a region of the world with few guitar shops I guess you make do with what’s around you, and in doing so you come up with something unique, magic, don’t you think?

The pick was made from a standard cable tie with the end sanded down to create perhaps a .60 to .80 pick edge tapering up to the original thickness of the cable tie. You also get a built in grip with the teeth of the cable tie.

When used it enables the player, with the right technique, to create percussive tremolo picking, in bursts or longer lines. The pick also enables you to change the interface with the instrument, you end up playing as if striking the strings, you feel somewhere between a percussionist and guitarist. The approach has a bouncy quality to it, and timbre of the guitar is also changed dramatically, with a sharpness to the sound that really cuts through. I heard it demonstrated on a classical guitar which worked exceptionally well. I’ve subsequently tried it on my steel string acoustic, it maybe has a bit too much bite on the acoustic, however, I’m looking forward to trying this new technique on my electric, through an amp.

I’m defiantly certainly adding the “bounce pick” to my collection and I encourage you to try, I’d love to hear how you get on.

I’ve posted over on insta with some more details of the new picking style, some diagrams and videos. Please do check them out.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Ck_iwv3L4Sk/?igshid=YmMyMTA2M2Y=