Bring Out More Musical Creativity Using Guitar Pick Patterns in Your Guitar Picking Styles

Guitar pick patterns are an essential part of the guitarist’s creative arsenal.  You can use them to create interesting and creative guitar parts using very simple fret hand chord shapes—the guitar pick patterns you use add great musical texture to your sound.  They can be used on acoustic or electric guitar and with either a clean or distorted guitar tone.  They are the key to building your guitar picking styles.

Today I want to show several guitar pick patterns and how to use and combine them with different chord shapes and chord progressions.  You will learn how to use them easily with six, five and four note chords.

To create a simple way to notate these patterns, let’s look at a pattern for a G chord:

For this lesson, we are going to focus on the pick hand by simply notating the strings that need to be picked.  For the G chord (which is a six string chord,) we would notate the pattern like this:

This pick pattern can be used with any six string chord fingering—E major or E minor for example.

If we were to use this same pattern with a five string chord like an Am or a C, it would look like this:

 As you can see, the top strings are exactly the same—all we did was change the bass (bottom) note of the chord.  This is how you can make your guitar pick patterns “portable” and use them with a number of different chords.  You will be able to create varied guitar picking styles by using just a few simple patterns.

Let’s look at a pattern that we can easily use with a six, five or four string chord.  For example, say we have a chord progression that uses a G (six string chord,) C (five string chord) and D (four string chord.)

Picking pattern #1

Six string chord:

Five string chord:

Four string chord:

Once again, notice how only the first note of each pattern is different.  The remaining notes are the same.  Using this idea you can create picking patterns that can be used with chords containing different numbers of strings.

Here are more variations on the same idea.  I will give you the six string version and you can apply it to both five and four string chords by changing the bass note:

Picking pattern #2:

Picking pattern #3:

Picking pattern #4:

All of these guitar pick patterns can be used with any open chord shape by simply changing the bass note from the sixth string to whichever note is the bass note of the chord you want to play.

For more musical variations and ideas with these guitar picking styles, you can change them up within a song or chord progression. 

For example, on the first chord of the chord progression, you could use pattern #2 and on the second chord of the progression switch to pattern #4.  And of course, these ideas are just to help you get started with guitar pick patterns—you can and should create your own, too.

The best way to develop your picking and your guitar picking styles are to start using these patterns with all the chord shapes you already know and practice.  In addition to being very musical sounding, they will also help you develop control, speed and coordination with your pick hand.  

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