Hybrid Picking: Lines & Licks for Guitar Book Review

By: Matthew Warnock

Guitar players usually fall within two camps when it comes to how they pick their instrument. On the one side you have the players that use a pick to play and strum all of their notes and chords, and on the other side of the aisle you have cats that fingerpick to pluck each note and chord. While both approaches offer merit, depending on the style of music played and the tastes of the guitarist using them, many players often ignore a third option when it comes to their choice of picking technique.

Hybrid picking melds both of these approaches, pick and fingers, giving the performer the “best of both worlds” so to speak when it comes to playing chords and single-line runs. When playing runs you can choose to use just the pick in the traditional sense, or a mixture of pick and fingers to expand your picking-hand options, and for chords you can choose to strum them with a pick or pluck them like a fingerstylist using a mixture of pick and fingers, usually with the pick on the lowest note and the other three fingers covering the chord.

This third option, which is called “hybrid picking” is a technique that is explored in-depth by guitarist and author Gustavo Assis-Brasil in his new book Hybrid Picking: Lines & Licks for Guitar For All Styles. The book, which has a forward by Guthrie Govan and endorsements from John Stowell, Tim Miller, Nelson Veras and Tosin Abasi, is 110 pages of exercises, licks and patterns geared towards introducing guitarists to the hybrid picking technique, providing them with all the practice room tools they need to use these approach in their own playing, mostly with an emphasis on single-note playing.

Though the book focuses more on the single-note line aspect of the guitar, these techniques can easily be transferred into an accompaniment role as well. For example, any of the exercises in the section covering Arpeggios can be used to improvise single-lines, or to work an arpeggiated chord progression as a back-up role behind another soloist, spanning both the lead and rhythm roles of the guitar. As well, any player that works through these exercises in the woodshed will develop all the picking-hand technique you need to comp and/or solo with single-lines and arpeggio/chord shapes on the guitar.

The material presented is divided up into eight sections, with each focusing on a particular harmonic or melodic function using hybrid-picking. These eight sections are:

• Preliminary Exercises
• Octave Displacement Lines & Licks
• Triads
• Pentatonics
• Scales and Modes
• Arpeggios
• Intervallic Lines & Licks
• Atonal Lines & Licks

So as you can see, Assis-Brasil covers all the melodic bases with this material, ensuring that guitarists who work out of this book will never find a situation in their playing where they can’t apply the hybrid-picking technique. The book also provides enough material so that players looking to develop their chops have ample exercises to work from, and those looking to improve their improvising will also have plenty of ideas to work out in their soloing.

Hybrid picking is an often overlooked picking technique on the guitar, but one that can provide new inspiration and technical facility for guitarists of all levels and styles. Assis-Brasil’s new book provides a very detailed, well-written and enjoyable look at this important technique and how players of all levels and styles can inject it into their playing. At a list price of 24.99$, the hard-copy book is more than worth the price, and will make a great addition to the practice library of any practicing guitarist.