Beloved by hot-rod country and rock guitarists alike,
hybrid picking combines the
power and speed of flatpicking
with some benefits of a purely
fingerstyle approach, such as
being able to weave arpeggios
across non-adjacent strings or
simultaneously strike chord tones
for a piano-like sound. (For
details on this versatile technique, see “Hybrid Picking 101”
on the next page.) But compared
to a four-digit classical or jazz
fingerstyle technique, hybrid
picking has several limitations.
The most obvious is that when
playing chords, this pick-plus-two-fingers system lets you attack
only three notes at a time.
Most guitarists who use
hybrid picking shift between
a full-on flatpick and a pick-and-fingers approach on the fly.
While this offers a huge timbral
palette, it can be tough to balance the big, chimey sound of
strummed five- and six-string
chords with the thinner tone of
plucked three-string chords. One
way to beef up the latter is to
use special three-note voicings
that are spread out across a wider
range than the typical triads you
might otherwise grab. It’s easy
to generate “hybrid-friendly”
chords, once you know the
process.
We’ll begin by modifying
standard root-3rd-5th triads,
which always occupy a single
octave. To make these triads
sound bigger, we simply move
the middle note—the 3rd (or
in the case of a minor triad, the
%3rd)—down or up an octave,
while leaving the root and 5th in
the same register. In this lesson,
we’ll discover what happens when
we drop the 3rd an octave lower.
Next time around, we’ll focus on
raising the 3rd one octave higher.
Either way, the resulting open
triads span more than an octave.
Fig. 1
Click here to head to
premierguitar.com/jan2011
to hear sounds clips of these examples.
Fig. 1
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
7
6
5
4
2
5
7
5
5
3
2
5
2
1
0
4
2
4
2
0
0
3
2
4
3 14
2 14
3 14
2 14
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
m
let ring
2
a
m
a
= flatpick
= middle finger
= ring finger
0
2
2
0
0
5
5
7
7
5
ma
let ring
7
10
4
5
9
a
m
10
7
10
a
m
9
7
10
79
7
7
7
9
0
7
0
6
0
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
a
m
m
a
m
8
7
9
7
5
7
5
3
5
3
2
4
1
0
2
3
2
4
5
7
3
3
5
5
5
