 Hi, and welcome to another guitar lesson here for the NCSSM classical guitar curriculum. Now I want to show you today just an important concept of how to hold your right hand when you're strumming, now that we've learned good strumming technique, versus using a pick to pick a melody or single note lines. Now what I find with folks that are just trying to figure out the guitar is the strumming part seems pretty natural. If you've gone through my strumming video, you know that you're going to be strumming inner rhythms to the pulse, and that your hand has to be loose. You're typically going to be strumming over, I like to strum over the back part of the hole in the instrument, so right about in this area, and nothing is sort of anchored to the guitar. When you strum, you necessarily have to be loose in that right hand. So your arm hits the guitar up here at your elbow, but the rest is free. But when you're playing with a pick, it's a little bit different, because you need to have some reference point of where that pick's going to go on, which string it's going to go to, so that when you need to get that string or that string, you can sort of feel where you're going, instead of, this is wrong, if you're trying to just kind of find strings out of mid-air. It gives you a reference point here that you can use. So let me show you just a couple of things that I find to be really helpful. When I'm picking, first of all, you want the pick to be laying on the top of your index finger, and then your thumb sort of covers that pick, so that you've got a nice anchor of the pick. And that's the beginning, just holding the pick correctly, and a lot of people don't hold the pick correctly, so you want to be careful that you have that. But here's the other thing. You want to anchor the palm of your hand back here at the bridge of the instrument. Now, what it does is it brings your pick back a little bit behind the hole here, but that's going to be okay. You're going to get a little brighter sound, and now you can feel which string you're going to. So let me just show you what I would do to get comfortable with individual picking exercises. I would anchor my hand back here, and it's really this part of my hand gets anchored behind the bridge, okay? Then I would practice playing alternate down and up strokes on each individual string. So I'd go to that high E string, and then while I'm at it, I would practice playing just down strokes. Then I'd go to the second string, the B string, alternate down and ups, and then just downs. Go to the next string, the G string, alternate, now just down, and so on through all six strings on the guitar. That'll begin to get you comfortable with that concept of picking. Now, once you've done that a little bit, the next step is to do the same thing, but put some fingers down on the fingerboard. A great way to do this is to play four strokes on the open string, then four on the first fret, the second fret, the third fret, and the fourth fret, and then return back to the open string. I'll show you what I mean. On the high E string, something like this. Then I would do that on all six strings. Let me just go ahead and show you. G string, and so on on all six strings. When you're comfortable doing it four times on each pitch, then go to three. When you're comfortable doing it three on all six strings, two. When you're comfortable with twos, then go to one. It's a great little exercise for getting used to picking. Now, you can do those alternating down and ups, and you can do them all downs. It's a great way to practice. At that point, you're not looking at any music. It's a technique builder at that point, and it's a very different idea than the down and ups, the big strokes of the strum. Once you get comfortable with that, I recommend you go back to the songs that you did in learning to read notes. Notes on the E and B string, notes on the G and D string, and notes on the A and E string, and try playing those songs that are essentially melody lines. Try playing them with a pick and see if you can get them, the first one, jingle bells, and work on each of those songs a little bit with the pick. When you get really good at it, play a couple of them for me. I'll give you a song credit for transferring that information to a picking style instead. This ought to set you up really well for being able to pick, as well as being able to strum on chords. Good luck, and when you feel like you've mastered a little bit, show me what you know, and if you need some help, come get ahold of me.