


It’s totally normal to want to hold on to the pick tightly, because you don’t want it to move and you don’t want to drop it. You might be tempted to make the up and down movement with your lower part of your arm (your forearm), but though your lower arm will be moving up and down a little bit as well, that’s only a small part of the movement. (Funk guitarist Ross Bolton calls this a ‘drunken wrist’. Most of the movement will come from rotating your lower arm (you could also say: twisting your wrist) and letting your hand and wrist hang loose and follow that motion. Make sure you're not locking your wrist: you need to keep it nice and loose. We’ll take a closer look at how this works later in this guide. Constantly moving your hand also makes it much easier to keep time. By doing this, you don’t have to think about when you need to move your strumming hand: it’s moving all the time. Keep your strumming hand moving at all times, even when you’re not hitting any strings for a couple of beats.
