Lesson ID: A0057
It’s amazing how fast flatpickers Tony Rice, Bryan Sutton, David Grisham, and Dan Tyminski can pick on the guitar. If you’re anything like me, you’re always trying to pick faster and with more precision to keep up with these legends. In this lesson, we’ll go over some must-know bluegrass flatpicking techniques that will really help you increase your speed and improve your accuracy! If you like this lesson, you might also like our Bluegrass Lick Library.
| Video Start Time | Lesson Topic |
|---|---|
| 00:00 min | Lesson Overview |
| 00:33 min | Pick Direction for Building Speed |
| 02:24 min | Your Choice of Guitar Pick |
| 03:19 min | Two Important Pick Angles |
| 05:31 min | Relax Your Wrist but Play with a Heavy Hand |
Devin – I found your website a few minutes ago. Very impressed — easy to use and I like how you have the tabs below each lesson. Just joined. Keep up the great work and looking forward to weekly lessons.
Just subscribed, but can’t get any of the videos to play. They keep saying “Error loading video. Please reload the page and try again in a couple of minutes.” What gives???
Hey Joel – Sorry about the technical difficulties! I’m glad you sent a message just now…I informed our IT team and they’re working on the glitch. I deactivated the AB looping player so you can watch all the videos now…the AB looper and video slow down features should be back up and running tomorrow. I’ll keep you posted. Thanks for the message – Devin
Thanks Joel, looks like it’s fixed now. No clue what the problem was…must’ve been a temporary outage. Thanks again for the heads up!
Working great now! Thanks for the quick response, Devin!
Amazing lessons Devin! You really have a talent for breaking everything down.
been working on right hand lately. have always been able to hold the pick as you describe during lead parts. I struggle with this during fast rhythm parts and especially on up strokes as the pick will start to rotate. My solution has always been to tweak my grip a bit during rhythm parts with pointer finger angled more towards the point of the pick. i dont like doing this and hope to keep the correct grip on both lead and rhythm. Any tricks you can describe which will help me over come the pick starting to rotate? do you… Read more »
Got it now! I’m going to practice these 2 angle pick…..thanks Devin!
Great tip about the angle to pick edge! Just tried it – it’s much faster and smoother than how I have been playing. Thanks!
Do you anchor at all or float? Also, do you use mostly wrist or is there any finger movement?