“I’ve seen a lot of guys who don't use a pick — George Benson, Bruce Bolen, Jerry Reed, Roy Clark — but never, never me, man,” B.B. King told Guitar Player in 1984. “Always the pick. I'm really lost if I've got to play without it. I'm horrible at chords without one. I'm terrible at fingerpicking. In fact, I'm even ashamed to try it. But I do know how to use a pick.”
As B.B. himself admitted, he wasn’t a particularly fast player, simply because “I play mostly downstrokes,” he said. Furthermore, he added, “I use a medium pick that isn't very flexible at all. I'm old-fashioned: I was taught to hold it with two fingers in the first place, so I still do it that way most times. I hold it with my thumb and index, and control it with my middle finger.”
To that end, he was a hard player, attacking the strings of his electric guitars more ferociously than a jazz player and even many rock guitarists. “I fight the strings at times for presence,” he said, “to get that force.”
Despite this, B.B.’s playing was dynamic and tonally varied. He played guitar licks and solos like he was talking to you, with all the variances and nuances of speech. A key to this was his pick handling. As he told us, there are a range of tones you can create on a guitar simply by varying your pick’s angle of attack and where it lands on the strings .
“Most times when you're playing, you don't hold your pick completely flat against the strings, like a shovel against the ground,” he said. “You turn it and have it so that it's not exactly flat with the string, but has a little bit of an edge or angle to it.”
That’s how you get a mellow sound, playing midway between the end of the neck and the bridge.
“But when I want a real staccato sound. I play near the bridge and hold the pick flat so I won't get that ‘whoosh’ sound,” B.B. explained. “I take the extra effort to make sure I'm hitting the string where I want to hit it. and the way I want to hit it.
“It's almost like playing golf or pool: You've got a certain bit of English that you're going to use,” he added, referring to the spin a player will put on a ball to affect its course.
“Now, most of us that have been playing a long time do these things without thinking about them. If you're new at playing or haven't tried different ways of holding the pick, give them a try.“
