HYBRID PICKING Speed, dynamics & more!

Stuart Ryan shows you how to get your pick and fingers working together, allowing you to play licks that are tricky or impossible with plectrum only.

Hybrid playing can up your game in many styles. Stuart Ryan has eight mini-workouts and three full pieces to get your fingers flying.

Hybrid picking is one of those techniques that fascinates and terrifies guitarists in equal measure. This may stem from that the fact that our first exposure to the technique is often via the burning licks of players like Albert Lee and Brad Paisley – country pickers for whom hybrid is second nature. However, there are many guitarists who use it in other genres often to more subtle and less challenging effect. For instance, the intro to Cream’s Crossroads is largely played hybrid. Rock and roll and rockabilly are also areas where hybrid picking finds favour (check out Brian Setzer), and of course there are many great blues guitarists that opt for a similar appproach, like Rory Gallagher. Rock players such as Brett Garsed, Zakk Wylde and Ron Thal also use it to create blistering licks.

Hybrid picking means combining the pick and fingers when plucking the strings. Some guitarists will use the pick and second finger (m), some will use pick, second and third (a) finger, and there are players like Albert Lee who use pick, second, third and fourth (c) digit. However, this last group is few and far between and for the majority it will be pick, second and third.

The technique has several advantages over just using a pick. First, you can string skip with ease as the fingers will be doing the work that the pick on its own would usually be doing. Secondly it’s a lot easier to ‘cross pick’ or jump from one string to another and this is something you’ll commonly see when country players employ hybrid picking, allowing them to play banjo rolls across three strings. There are also players like Robben Ford who will use it as a phrasing device, often using a finger to grab a string so they can then ‘pop’ it against the neck for a really dramatic effect.

Learning to hybrid pick needs to be done slowly and in stages. Some of the exercises and pieces in this article will be challenging, but they are intended to be approached over a long period of time. In order to hybrid pick it’s important that the picking-hand fingers are comfortable with just picking the strings to begin with. If you have some experience playing fingerstyle then you will already be used to this but if you are just getting started then take the exercises very slowly and place a real emphasis on getting comfortable with the picking-hand fingers striking the strings.

At first hybrid picking can seem like a slow, frustrating journey, and the ability of players like Zakk Wylde, James Burton and Brent Mason can seem like a world away. But it’s really worth persevering as the results can be spectacular. It’s one of those techniques that relies upon a great deal of repetition to build up the strength and fluency between the pick and fingers, and what’s more when you get used to it you’ll see many of the same patterns being used over and over again.

In this article we’ll start off with some exercises to get the technique in place, then we’ll explore how it works in real-world examples from several genres. What’s more, there are certain things you just can’t play with pick only, so getting into hybrid now could set you up on a path to a whole new way of playing - or at least giving you another extremely powerful string to your bow!

IT’S A TECHNIQUE THAT RELIES UPON A GREAT DEAL OF REPETITION TO BUILD STRENGTH AND FLUENCY BETWEEN THE PICK AND FINGERS