Guitar 101: Heavy Metal Hybrid Picking

Hybrid picking—the practice of interspersing flatpicked notes with notes plucked by your middle or ring finger—is a technique that many metalheads mistakenly believe is just for country, blues and jazz players. The fact that it remains underutilized by the shred guitar community means that hybrid picking can be smartly employed as a shredder’s “secret weapon”— just ask Zakk Wylde, John 5, Jason Becker ...

Hybrid picking—the practice of interspersing flatpicked notes with notes plucked by your middle or ring finger—is a technique that many metalheads mistakenly believe is just for country, blues and jazz players.

The fact that it remains underutilized by the shred guitar community means that hybrid picking can be smartly employed as a shredder’s “secret weapon”—just ask Zakk Wylde, John 5, Jason Becker, Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal, Greg Howe, Michael Lee Firkins, George Bellas, Dave Martone, Marshall Harrison or the scariest hybrid picker known to man, former GIT instructor Brett Garsed.

Hybrid picking involves using your plectrum along with your pick-hand fingers to articulate certain notes. This fingers-as-extra-plectra approach is especially handy for string skipping. Suddenly, notes on adjacent or non-adjacent strings are a cinch to play in quick succession, without the laborious movement of “airlifting” the pick back and forth.

Let’s get this lesson started with an E minor pentatonic exercise (FIGURE 1) that begins with a middle-finger pluck (m) on the high E string, followed directly by a pick downstroke on the B string. (To finish off each four-note grouping, use a pull-off followed by a hammer-on.) FIGURE 2 is nearly identical, the only difference being the highest note, G, which is fretted as part of a ring-finger mini-barre across the top two strings.

In FIGURE 3, we take the concept one step further by applying all four fret-hand fingers to