I mostly use forearm-rotation escaped upstroke style with more of a straight-thumb “extended trigger” that uses the pad of the thumb and what you describe as a “side-pad” grip. Will try to wrangle a helper to put together some shots this weekend so you can see these in context on the front of the guitar.
Edit: I was probably inspired to dabble with the “bent thumb” approach by the Paul Gilbert clip below:
That’s interesting, because I think we all do that to some extent, myself included — and of course we’ve talked about the thumb’s role in modulating both edge picking and pickslanting. But when I do it the pad stays connected to the pick, and the pick itself tends to roll around the circumference of the index finger a little bit more than usual. But what’s interesting here is, if this is your “more edge picking” orientation, then you are ending up at my starting point. Does that mean that your starting point for pad-side is more of a pressed grip, i.e. not on the side of the index but somewhere on the angle between side and pad?
Thanks for a great reference!
The only thing I felt missing was a discussion on what these different grips let you do, in the “which one should I choose” section. E.g. not all grips are as suitable for hybrid picking. A few players also switch between grips fluently. IIRC Paul Gilbert, that @Frylock just referenced, switches to a three-finger grip for strumming for example.
One thing I’ll say is that I think my motivation for experimenting with this was less about how it affects edge picking, and more to do with how the “wrapping around toward the nail of the index finger” allows me to keep the pick standing vertically relative to the plane of the strings even when I have a fair degree of supinated forearm rotation in my “neutral” setup position. The initial goal was to try to jig things to allow escaped downstrokes with a motion that had a significant forearm rotation component. There’s a variation of this that involves a slightly different positioning of the pick relative to the palm, which is something I’ve messed with that I describe as being sort of like Ardeshir Farah.
I’ll have to take a little time to parse your second question before I try to answer, but as I said, I’ll try to put up a collection of these things on the weekend, with better visual context.
Definitely. That’s coming up in the arm orientations and motions sections. Everything is integrated. For example when we teach Mike Stern style wrist motion, it’s done with Mike Stern-style arm setup and Mike Stern style grip. More extended grips pair with slightly more supinated arm positions. And middle/three-finger grips pair with the most supinated arm positions and motions, a la Albert Lee and Steve Morse.
Each of these arm, grip, and motion pairings are like little families, and each is capable of your core pickstroke types - downstroke escape, upstroke escape, and double escape. That’s how we observe them in the real world, so each family gets its own lesson chapter.
Edit: So these grip chapters are just laying the foundation for understanding the later stuff. So by the time we say, ok, we’re doing lightly supinated forearm, and you’re going to use your classic trigger grip for this, the viewer hopefully goes “ah, ok, I know what that is”.
If I’m reading the question correctly, I think the answer is that like you, when I’m wrapped around the index finger, I’m pretty much at the limit of how much leading edge I can add with just movement of the thumb and index finger, and my arm approach etc. is such that the resulting edge picking is the default amount I want, which is quite a bit. I’ll add that I like to wear the guitar pretty high, so the approach angle of my forearm may be closer to parallel to the strings than a lot of folks might prefer.
If I ever want even more edge picking with the bent thumb grip, I add it by changing the wrist angle. In general, for slower playing with more dynamics and frequent flatter attack, I use more of a straight thumb angle-pad approach. So with respect to the bent-thumb grip, maybe I’m the guy who, metaphorically speaking, doesn’t need to add even more sugar (edge picking) to his coffee, because the amount he likes as a starting point is already a lot.
So if I’m understanding this correctly, the tip-side thumb contact isn’t really giving you “wrapped around the index” levels of edge picking. It’s just giving you the same amount of edge picking that I get with an extended thumb and pad-side contact. Because from the photos it doesn’t look like a wrapped grip (I think we’re coining that - you saw it here first @Montreal543!!). It looks like a typical side-of-the-index contact, just with the thumb highly flexed. And again, you’re doing that because you want the pick oriented that way given your supinated arm setup. Whew.
So… you can’t bend the thumb any more than this to get more edge picking out of this arrangement, so you’ll get it via ulnar wrist offset instead. But you may not often want / need more edge picking than this arrangement gives you, because your approach angle gives that to you by default anyway.
Let me know if I’m getting this.
Duly noted! Love the coined terms - they’re very helpful in the learning process!
In practice I may sometimes wrap it a little more than these photos reveal, but no more than, say, 15 degress or so more than these photos. Everything else you’re saying sounds pretty much on the mark.
Cool–looking forward to checking these videos out this weekend
I was just checking out the intro scene in “Back to the Future” when Marty blows up the amp. The scene has a great shot of his pick grip, and Marty’s grip is pretty uncommon I think. I’ve attached a still showing the grip below. I may be wrong, but it looks like he uses a “pad side trigger-style grip with a 135 degree pick point and high pick exposure”…so of course this results in an exploded amp!
Hahaha!
Since MJF actually does play a little guitar in that movie, I can only imagine this is the director going, no no no, turn it that way — while directing the gaffer to get that highlight glinting exactly so.
There’s a fun article about the anachronism involved around the Gibson Marty plays back in 1955:
https://www.guitarworld.com/gear/marty-mcflys-back-future-gibson-es-345-was-actually-future
That’s awesome. Marty’s ES-345 is from the future, and his pick grip is from some other dimension!
Huh. Fry, that’s actually not all THAT different than the way I hold the pick, too - same pointner finger orientation with the pick braced against the side of a curled finger, but maybe a hair less thumb angle (maybe 60 instead of 90 degrees). I’m at work so this is off memory, but I do recall previously noticing that I tend to work the angle of the thumb joint a little bit while playing, though I haven’t really put the time it to see if there’s anything systematic about the way I do it, and if it’s something that’s evolved due to a specific playing situation.
Tangental aside - that’s the thing that probably gets to me the most about this site. I’m naturally a pretty analytical guy, I’m a financial analyst by trade, am pretty curious, and once a question gets my attention I’ll spend a LOT of time getting to the bottom of it. At the same time, I also love guitar, and spend a lot of time practicing. Yet, there are so many things about the guitar - something I care greatly about being good at - that I’ve literally just never put any serious thought into figuring out. Like, I’ve always suspected there must be something I’m doing wrong with my picking because it’d always been such a struggle for me, but somehow I never actually sat down and tried to reason through what the challenges were. And, even having watched Troy do just that, and even after correctly identifying this little wind-up mechanic in my motion that struck me as weird only to be told this is textbook two-way pickslanting, and all these other little breakthroughs like that (and seriously, my picking has improved more in the last year than in the prior five, probably), I cann still find myself noticing something unusual I’m doing, noting it… And then just leaving it at that, and spending exactly zero time trying to figure out why I was doing it, lol.
Man. I guess it’s probably because I tend to do a lot of improvising and for me guitar is a NON-analytic escape from a very analytic day job… But I gotta get a lot more structured about this stuff, lol. I’m just shooting myself in the foot.
I’m down with that, and that is ultimate the goal here — to make the information as simple and accessible as we can, so that the guitar experience can be mostly non-analytical, the way it was when we all first started. That’s the way playing feels best to me, honestly, and that’s also the way learning works best — when it happens stealthily over time to where you don’t really notice.
I wouldn’t feel too guilty about getting structured or disciplined. Most things that people do are fine, and don’t need to be changed, specifically. It’s more about knowing why they work and making sure the stuff you’re trying to play fits that.
While this is of course all true (not just the part I quoted above), this seems like an opportunity where a little bit of research and structured thinking - you know, my usual problem solving approach, haha - would reap some pretty major dividends.
Eh, the important thing is to still have a sense of humor about it, at the end of the day. 
Seen as I’m a total noob here I must ask, where do I start? I’m a basic member I believe so don’t have access to everything. Do I ideally subscribe and start with the pickslanting primer and go through it all? Sorry, just a little lost here!
Hey, welcome! Yes, if you’re looking to dive into our technique tutorial, the Pickslanting Primer is the place to start, covering a range of important technical topics, from picks and grip to specific picking motions:
We suggest experimenting a bit and choosing a motion that feels comfortable, then practicing that for a bit, trying to get it consistent at speed. With a subscription you can check out our seminars + interviews as well for further musical inspiration depending on your interests.
Once you have a handle on the core concepts you can also post to #technique-critique here on the forum if you’d like to share video of your playing for feedback. Of course any other questions / suggestions always welcome too! Lots of great conversations here on all kinds of topics.
If you’d like to get a better sense of our material before signing up, our whole site functions as a kind of table of contents — from the homepage at https://troygrady.com/ you can click through to navigate to the various sections of the site and see a listing of what’s included.
We do have some free videos scattered throughout the site (anything with a teal outline). And if you want to see all our free stuff in one place, you can check out our YouTube channel and subscribe for updates when we post new free videos.
Hope that helps. We do have a simple “getting started” page here too, definitely open to suggestions if you think there’s more we should add here:
If you still have questions or anything we can help clarify further just let us know!
That’s great Brendan, thank you!
