“He said, ‘Yeah, you know, it’s kind of harder to play that way’, but he just loved the way it sounded”: Eric Johnson on why pick choice and picking style are fundamental to your playing – and how his favourite jazz player got his sound by using his thumb

Eric Johnson wears headpnones as he takes a solo on his Strat during the 2023 G3 Tour.

We guitar players spend an awful lot of time thinking about gear, and an awful lot of time thinking about how we can sound better – how we can play better. Some of this time could be better spent practising. That’s life. Nonetheless, the guitarist’s mind is rarely idle.

But what proportion of our reveries is devoted to guitar picks, or indeed how we decide to use them? More than our choice of electric guitar, or whichever overdrive pedal is the most transparent, this could well be the most important choice we make.