Tutorial: DIY adaptive guitar picks

Many students want to touch our guitars and ukuleles as soon as they appear in the classroom. These students are sometimes visibly disappointed or frustrated at the sound they create with their inexperienced bare fingers. Other students need to be coaxed to interact with the instrument, sometimes because of an aversion to the tactile experience, especially when touching steel strings. Some students engage more deeply when they are given choices of how to play the instrument.

In all of these cases, it can be very helpful to offer students the opportunity to use a guitar pick, especially a user-friendly adaptive one. Traditional plastic guitar picks can be very difficult to hold, especially for someone with developing fine motor skills… and, of course, it is very tempting to insert them into the sound hold of the instrument! Adaptive guitar picks are easier to grasp and hold, and produce a clearer sound than fingertips. 

Left: the gift card style.

Right: the paintbrush handle style.

Here are two types of Do-It-Yourself guitar picks that we make and use with our students.

My favorite homemade guitar pick is one that Jen invented and made for me from a used-up gift card, two hair elastics and hot glue. It’s pretty self-explanatory but you can watch our instructional video below for details on how to make your own.

The other one that I keep in my teaching bag for the sake of variety is one that I made from a dollar store paintbrush, a heavy duty plastic jazz guitar pick, and glue. It is very easy to grasp. Many students angle it in a way that makes the wooden handle scrape on the strings, which can be a jarring sound. Constructing it required the use of pliers (to remove the metal band and bristles from the paintbrush, leaving only the wooden handle) and a Dremel tool (to cut the groove in which the guitar pick sits). My first attempt at this used a lightweight guitar pick that I had on hand and it quickly broke off during use, so make sure to get a heavy duty pick if you are making one of these!

Heavy duty jazz guitar pick glued into a paintbrush handle.

Side view of the pick groove, created by Dremel tool.