In other words, a guitar that has some versatility to it is going to be your friend. It’s good to go with a guitar that has good response from the pickups to be able to have clarity at softer volumes without being too harsh when the plucking gets a little edgy. What Is The Best Electric Guitar For Fingerpicking?įingerpicking can be done on any electric, but typically if you are fingerpicking on the electric guitar, you are probably playing some form or combination of jazz or blues. Getting fingers up under the strings and pulling them up until they slap back down on the fingerboard gives the string quite the “snap”. The soft attack of the thumb and fingers is sometimes more desirable for certain sounds, but make no mistake – fingers can be just as abrasive as a pick. Use of the thumb as a picker and strummer is common among guitarists like Jeff Beck who ditch the pick altogether.
You can then quickly fish out the pick from between those two fingers and get back to strumming. This requires picking with the fingers closed at their base rather than spread apart. It can allow the player to hit more notes with efficiency and be able to string notes together more quickly.Īnother way to fingerpick with the electric is to tuck the pick away between the index and middle fingers.
This is a combination of pick and fingers to get certain sounds of chords and to get a contrast in sound between the attack of the pick and the finger. One of the great uses of fingerpicking with an electric guitar is hybrid picking. There is not much difference at all in the mechanics.
Too often, electric guitar players are quick to run to an effect pedal or piece of software for their tonal needs when the best place to start is with their own hands! The strings feel a bit different and aren’t usually as taught as those of the acoustic, but it’s not much of a transition. Can You Play Electric Guitar With Fingers? This means you will need to pick more softly but the technique creates an excellent tone. The mechanics are very similar to fingerpicking on an acoustic guitar but the strings are often a smaller gauge and less taught. Yes, you can fingerpick on an electric guitar and you should. The electric guitar is a very dynamic instrument and using different methods for plucking strings is one of the ways to capitalize on dynamic variance. The use of fingers along with, or sometimes instead of a pick is quite common. Electric guitarists can get down with it, too. Fingerpicking is not just for acoustic players.