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On behalf of Expert Village I'm Reno at Reno's Music Shop in Camp Greeny, Arizona, and I'm
going to tell you about flatpicking the guitar. The reason we call it flatpicking is because
of the pick, because what we?re doing, we practice using down and up strokes, eighth
notes. So you practice this as much as you can stand it. Practice every scale you can
think of, make up a scale, learn to control your pick with power and precision. Speed it up. Everything we do in bluegrass
isn't lightning fast, sometimes it's not only all that fast, its precision and its power.
So work on your right hand for power. Use a nice string that gives you good tone and
lots of volume. We're competing with banjos, fiddles, mandolins and dobros which are also
very loud. So we want to get as much volume out of this guitar as we can, so use a set
of medium strings. There's a lot of brands, you have to experiment. The same with picks.
There's a lot of brands. So once again, experiment. Have fun with it and don't get stuck on one
thing because that's a sign of old age.