Guitar picks for beginners

Why nobody can tell you which pick to buy

Almost every other recommendation on this site can be reasoned to an answer. A 3/4 guitar is correct for an eight-year-old because arms are a measurable length. A solid top is better than a laminate because of what happens to wood over years. Picks do not work like that. The right pick depends on how hard you hit the strings, how you hold your hand, whether you mostly strum or mostly pick single notes, and how much your fingers sweat — and on day one, none of those things about you exists yet.

This is why pick advice online is so confidently contradictory. Every guitarist giving it is describing a right hand they have spent years building, and it is genuinely their correct answer. It is just not transferable. The honest version is that a beginner should spend about seven dollars finding out rather than twenty minutes reading about it.

That said, gauge is not arbitrary, and understanding what it does turns the experiment from random into directed. We have not played these picks and do not claim to have; the gauges, materials and pack contents below are read from the makers’ published specifications and the listings on a dated visit — see how we work.

What gauge actually changes

Pick thickness is measured in millimeters, and the range that matters runs from about 0.45 mm to about 1.2 mm. A thin pick flexes away from the string; a thick pick does not. Everything else follows from that one fact.

The second thing to know is that the number on the pick is reliable in a way reed strengths and string gauges are not. A 0.73 mm pick is 0.73 mm thick whoever made it. What is not comparable across brands is stiffness at the same thickness, because that depends on the material: a 0.73 mm celluloid pick flexes more than a 0.73 mm moulded pick of the same shape.

Material, and the only part of it a beginner notices

Pick marketing goes deep into materials, and most of the distinctions are real but inaudible until you have a consistent right hand. There is one exception, and it is about grip rather than tone.

• Matte moulded picks — Dunlop’s Tortex is the reference example — have a dry, slightly chalky surface. They stay in the hand when fingers are damp, which during a first nervous lesson they will be.
• Celluloid picks — Fender’s 351 is the reference example — are glossy and slick. They feel faster and brighter, and they are the ones that squirt out of a sweaty hand mid-strum.

If a beginner has decided that picks are “not for them” because the pick keeps rotating or falling, the fix is almost always switching from a slick pick to a matte one, not giving up. That is a six-dollar fix for a problem people quit over.

How to run the experiment

1. 1

   Buy a gauge ladder, not a gauge

   A variety pack with two picks in each thickness costs about what one box of a single gauge costs. Two of each matters because the first one gets lost.

2. 2

   Play the same thing with each

   Pick one chord progression you already know and one single-note line. Changing the music between picks tells you nothing about the picks.

3. 3

   Give each one a whole session

   A pick feels wrong for the first two minutes simply because it is different. Judge it at the end of a practice, not at the start.

4. 4

   Write down the color

   Gauge ladders are color-coded precisely so you can say 'the yellow one' instead of measuring. Note the color of the one you stopped noticing — that is the right pick.

5. 5

   Then buy a dozen of it

   Picks are a consumable that get lost rather than worn out. Once you know your gauge, a box of twelve is a year of losing them.

What we picked, and why

The criteria here are unusual for a roundup, because the best product for a beginner is explicitly the one that stops them needing a recommendation. We ranked on: whether it resolves the gauge question, whether the pack is cheap enough to buy speculatively, whether the gauges are identifiable after the fact, and whether it covers a real second question (material, or instrument type) rather than a manufactured one.

Every pick below is a pack rather than a single, because single picks are sold at a price per gram that only makes sense if you already know exactly what you want. The honest cons are listed on each — including on the top pick, which cannot tell you anything about shape.

The one place to spend more

Nowhere, on picks. This is the rare category where the fifteen-dollar premium option is genuinely not better for a beginner than the six-dollar one, and the money is better spent on the things that do change how a guitar plays: a fresh set of strings in the right gauge, a clip-on tuner, or a setup at a shop. A guitar with dead strings and a high action is not fixed by any pick.

If you are assembling a first guitar purchase from scratch, our page on what a guitar starter kit includes and leaves out covers the order to buy things in, and the capo roundup covers the one accessory a teacher asks for in the first couple of months.

Losing picks, and the only real storage answer

Picks are lost at a rate that surprises people. They go down the sound hole, into sofa cushions, and into the bottom of a case where they are invisible against the lining. A beginner who buys one pick will spend part of most weeks without a pick, and practicing without one because it is lost is how a habit breaks.

The answer is quantity rather than discipline, which is why every recommendation here is a twelve-pack. Some capos — the D’Addario NS Tri-Action among them — publish an integrated pick holder, which is genuinely more useful than it sounds for keeping one attached to the instrument itself.