Guitar Techniques: Fingerstyle Vs. Plectrum Picking

There are two different styles to play the guitar- Fingerpicking and the Plectrum style.

A plectrum is another name for a guitar pick, which is normally made out of a small flat piece of plastic that you use to strike the strings of the guitar. There are other guitarists that choose not to use a pick and instead use their fingers to pluck the strings.

There are advantages and disadvantages for both playing styles, so let’s compare the differences.

The Fingerpicking guitar style

I use fingerpicking as a general term, but there are different styles of playing the guitar with your fingers, such as Flamenco or the Travis picking style. For players that prefer this style they will normally tell you that they find it easier to play because they simply assign one finger to one string, and for the most part your hand can stay in one position as long as you keep your fingers assigned to their proper strings. I prefer the Fingerpicking style because I can play a lot faster without worrying about my pick striking multiple strings by mistake. One finger for one string, you can’t get any easier than that.

There are a lot of famous guitarists who use the fingerpicking style. Merle Travis invented the “Travis picking” guitar style and made it an extremely popular form of playing the guitar. With this style you can play bass notes with your thumb and the lower treble notes with your other four fingers to create complex and beautiful sounding music on your guitar. In the 1980s, Jeff Beck also adopted the Fingerpicking style and gave up the regular use of a guitar pick and helped boost the popularity of finger style guitar playing.

Most classical guitarists almost always use the fingerpicking style to play their guitars, but if you are playing on a steel string guitar you will find that the strings will begin to chip away your nails and cut into your fingers. That makes the fingerpicking style quite uncomfortable to play with, which is one of the cons to fingerpicking. You also have to maintain your fingernails and keep them quite long to get a loud and clear sound, otherwise the notes sound a bit flat and dead. Not everyone can keep long fingernails on their hands, so attempting to keep your nails at the proper length will quickly become a chore; especially if they keep breaking.

There are others who say that they feel like they are multitasking by trying to use all five fingers to play the strings on their guitar instead of just focusing on alternate picking with their plectrum. For those Guitarists they can’t seem to get their right hand fingers to move individually to perform the way they need them to, so they pick up a plectrum instead.

Plectrum guitar style

There are several different styles when using a guitar pick, but alternate picking is probably the most popular style used. One of the pros you will probably notice right away when using a pick is its loud and clear sound that the pick produces when it strikes the strings. The tone is a lot clearer than when you pluck the strings with your fingers.

For some guitarist they also say that using a pick is less of a hassle for them because once they get the rhythm of alternant picking they can lose themselves in the music and play without having to think about what their right hand is doing. Guitarist also say that they can play songs at faster speeds when using a guitar pick. You can also get slightly different tones based on the type of materiel the pick is made out of to give your music a more distinct sound. Lighter picks give a brighter sound while thicker picks give a heavier deeper sounding tone.

I never noticed before, but my brother actually said that he found fingerpicking on electric guitars to be a bit more difficult because of the instruments smaller size and low action. He said that his fingers kept touching the area near the pickups which caused complications.

One of the cons I found with guitar picks is that they can sometimes be a bit awkward to hold between your fingers, especially if you are just starting out and learning how to play. There are a lot of classical guitarists that find guitar picks to be an unnecessary burden because they have become accustomed to playing with their fingers, and there are some that can’t grasp the motion of alternate picking.

The main difference?

The difference between the two techniques really just boils down to player preference. Not everyone can become ambidextrous enough to use the fingerpicking style so they choose to use a pick instead. But Guitarists that started out learning the guitar with the fingerpicking style will more than likely stick with it.