Hey guys, so in this video I'm going to be answering a question from you guys online. This is from a guy called Keaton from Toronto. He's 36 and he says he's been learning Heijer over the last couple of days from one of my videos. And he says when he's been trying the single string picking videos, he's having real trouble with his picking hand in particular. The thing is doing what he's wanting to do on the cord hand side, but the single string picking lacks coordination and he's really struggling with that. And he says I'm holding my pick right. I like the lead guitar best and I'm a very coordinated athletic guy, so this confuses me which I feel is important to add, because you know a lot of people feel, oh, this is just me sometimes. I must just really struggle with this. Absolutely anyone can struggle when you don't know the right sort of things to do. So to help you out Keaton, we're going to do a bit of a close up on my picking hand to see how I would have you do it. But first of all, I just want to give you a general point about single string picking versus strumming. So when you're strumming, it wants to be a strumming action from at the elbow. You're very much moving your forearm from your elbow, sitting in the guitar as close to your body as you can. When you're picking single strings or even a pair of strings, it actually wants to be a wrist motion, not a strumming motion. The way I like to think about it is comparing how you would paint a big canvas of a background of a picture compared to how you would write your name or write nice and neat. You need to rest your hand or rest your wrist to be able to write nice and neat, right? And we want to rest our wrist on the guitar itself to get best results when single string picking. I'll show you exactly how to do that now in a close up. Okay guys, just to demonstrate, when we're strumming, it's a movement from the elbow and we're trying to keep our wrist as close to the guitar as we reasonably can without touching the guitar. So if I'm strumming just an image code, I've kept my wrist still and I've moved from the elbow. You don't want to tense your wrist at all, I compare it to standing up straight. It doesn't take any more muscles to do it, but you need to hold it in place. So hold your wrist in place to keep it as close to the guitar as possible. If this is happening, this is sort of what a lot of beginners can do with their wrist when they're strumming, it needs to be held right into the guitar, which prepares you for when you're playing single notes, which if I'm picking the thickest E string, it is very much a wrist motion. So we want to rest our hands on sort of the lower part of your thumb where your thumb meets, it meets your palm here, and we rest all the forearm on your guitar. This will be the same for electric or acoustic guitar, and it's a wrist motion. Remember, compare it to writing your name nice and neat. You would always rest your wrist, and strumming covers a larger area like paint in a big canvas. When we want to play the thinner strings, which is where many beginners riffs can start, see if they're thick at all the thinner ones, we can actually still rest our thumb, or the palm of our hand, on the strings themselves, and then pick the thinner ones. That's the best way to do it. What I want to say a lot of people do is rest in that little finger to be able to play the thinner strings. If you've gone for a C major scale lesson, you may have started doing it like that, because it's a big temptation, but we can't do that if you want to reach up to the thickest E string. So the thing that's going to work for all six strings, whenever you want to play any of them, and actually help you play, is going to be doing this. Rhythm guitarist, so the strum examiner, you may want to rest your hand on the bridge at this area, and sort of rest down like this. Keep your head on the outside of your hand. You can get away with that for a really long time, and then at some point, the fact that you're picking hand is sort of in its resting point, so far away from the strings may become a problem, but that's not going to become a problem for a very long time, and you can coach your way out of it, getting it back. But the best way to do it from the start, typically, is by doing it this way, by resting on your thumb, and then when you go from one string to the next, what we can do is rest your thumb on that string. Now let me show you what I mean. So when I pick the thickest E string, no problemo, my thumb, sort of the palm of my hand, is rested on the guitar at the thumb side, and I've sort of lifted my hand slightly this way. When I pick the A string straight after it, what I want to do is stop the E string that I've just come off from ringing out, so I've picked this one, then I pick this one, and I want this one to stop ringing out, so that it doesn't sound messy. What I do is I dab that string, string six, with my thumb, and then play the next one down, and then I can play six to five, and only one string rings out. When I go six to five without, they're both ringing out, and whatever riff I'm playing with me, or melody may sound messy. When we keep going down, the same thing just happens, you just want to touch the string, you've just come off with your thumb, and go down as follows. You want to try and make sure there is no gap there as much as possible, so you want to try and make sure there's no silence between each one, but that's the way it's done for going down. When you're coming back up, what we want to do is dab it with sort of your middle finger, your third finger, lay them down like this after you've played, but only we're only doing this as sort of a tap of the string, and that's enough. I'm very much resting sort of out here ready to pick the next string, but when I'm coming back... Compare that to... And you can see how that can really need to note all your single string playing. When you're hitting a pair of strings, for example, for a lead guitar part, or for the rhythm part, for the power chord, a pair of strings should be seen as the same as when you're picking a single one, you're just going a little bit further. I'm still resting my hand here typically though. I'm not pressing down on it or leaning down on it too much, we're just holding it in place as an anchor point, and then I'm just stopping this idea, which is going to hamper you, it's going to stop you hand moving an awful lot. Going back to the resting on the outside, as I say, this sort of all becomes very tempting to rest on the outside of your hand, rather than on the picking hand side for single string strums, though I did go and see Nile Rogers recently, and when he was playing everything, he was very much lent on the outside of his hand, but he has a certain more strumming style, which isn't, you know, he's not shredding solos as such now Rodgers, he's a... he's a strumming, so if he leans on the outside of his hand, that's totally fine. If you want him to play a melodies, it's probably better to rest on this side for most things.