Learning how to really pick like a professional on your guitar is an essential lesson for playing really powerful death metal guitar. Most of the verses and intros of common tunes are comprised of insane picking sections that really get your head banging.

Professional metal guitarists have usually been playing for years to develop the speed and skill that they have, but you can acquire a similar level of speed and technique with dedication. Check out these 5 effective tips to improve your death metal guitar-picking.

1. Experiment with how you hold the pick. A very simple way to impact the speed of your picking is to adjust the way that you hold the guitar pick. Experiment with different fingers and how much tip you reveal to see if you can encourage more speed from your hand.

2. Move only your wrist or even just your fingers. Learning the lesson about keeping all the movement in your wrist or even down to your fingers is a good one to learn. In death metal guitar songs you’re going to be doing a lot of picking and to improve your speed, you should cut as much tenseness in your arm out of the equation.

3. You may not be using the best guitar pick for speed. Guitar picks are not all created equally and you may not have the pick that you need to get to that next level of speed. Experiment with some other pick sizes, shapes, and thicknesses and determine what’s right for your style.

4. Practice consistent double picking. If you’re not already, you should be double picking, which is striking the string as you push it down and when you come back up. Pay close attention to this skill and try to be consistent with each strike for balanced strumming in your death metal songs.

5. Let your right hand have its moment. Your left hand has its time with the fingerings, but your picking hand should have time to focus as well. Leave your left hand out of the equation occasionally to improve your technique on strumming and picking for particularly difficult tunes.

There are a lot of lessons to be studied about death metal guitar that differs from other genres, but having a hard work-ethic will always be important for any style. Try out these tips and be dedicated to improving your picking to a fast and effective level of skill.

Kyle Hoffman is a constantly-performing musician that has been playing guitar for years in rock and hardcore bands. Learn his valuable tips for finding the best fast electric guitar course at this popular blog, How To Guitar Tune now!

Tagged with: • • • • • • • • •

Filed under: Hobbies

Like this post? Subscribe to my RSS feed and get loads more!