How hard do you pick?

[Christian Miller]

Force is not power

[John A.]

Force is not power

But given time it will be impulsive ...

Anyway, I'm having an interesting experience with respect to picking force. I recently had my semi-hollow refretted, and it's now MUCH easier to play and MUCH more responsive to picking force. I keep it strung lighter and with lower action than my archtop, and the difference in feel is now much more noticeable than it was before. So I'm now having to kind of re-learn how to play this guitar.

[KingKong]

Having read this thread and had a little go, yeh I'm pretty heavy handed with the picking. Heavy handed in most things in life tbh also.

But I seem to do it in rising and falling crescendos, e.g. take a line over 2 or 3 bars, ill build it up in the middle and accent a particular note with a nice 'twang', then take it back mellow again.

I quite like it, I quite like the associated change in sound with hard picking, like when u get a bit of fret-buzz etc. To me it adds expression, listen to gypsy jazz, Spanish flamenco or bb king for example.

[EllenGtrGrl]

Per one of the early posts in this thread, my picking style is sort of like Pat Martino's, but with that in mind, I would say I pick with medium to medium hard force. Much of this can be attributed to me using the round corner (instead of the pointy end) of the pick, so unless you have super light touch, you're going to typically pick a little harder on the strings. I will admit though, that I have spent more time paying attention to picking dynamics, due playing a lot more acoustic guitar in recent years (I play in the band of a local Catholic church, and the music director [who sings, and plays piano - a well-to-do couple donated a Steinway Concert to the church in 2017] insists upon acoustic instead of electric guitar [in a couple of hours, ye olde Guild OM-120 will get a workout practicing the songs I will be playing at 5 pm/17:00 mass today).

You want hard picking? Play bluegrass guitar - you REALLY dig into the strings to play that style of music. Also, nobody picks as hard as a friend of mine (whose brother played with me in a couple of bands) did when we were teenagers. He'd learned guitar from his dad (who played rhythm guitar in country bands), and every time my friend played guitar, he picked so hard, we used to cringe, because we expected him to break strings (I think he actually might have a couple of times).

[citizenk74]

An instrument noted to have an enormous dynamic range is the clavichord; it's range of volume available spreads from just "below a whisper" up to "pretty quiet".

LOL! You, Sir, have made my day! Thank you!

[citizenk74]

Playing a 0.015 - 0.060 set through powerful amps, I used to pick very hard, using the stiffest picks I could find. I did the same thing with my acoustic. After more than a half-century, I'm using 0.009s and have 0.008s in reserve. I am playing by myself, and using the lightest touch I can manage up through fairly forceful, in a strictly comparative way. I still use unyielding picks, however, so pick angle is variable, as is pick velocity. I like chords and lines to have comparable weight, and pick, plec, pluck, and strum accordingly.
I'm not saying it's working; it's just my intent.

[Stefan Eff]

I use a Dunlop Sculpted Plectra in 1.48 and it helps me a lot to achieve a soft, dynamic picking technique. A soft picking is the base of dynamic playing, especially if you‘ve got good responsive pickups and if you’re playing on the sweet spot of a tube amp. Works at least perfect for me.

[pdfiddler]

Too hard, I'm trying to retrain myself on this.