Finding the right style and width guitar pick for your play style is crucial to right hand development of your guitar skills. It’s a goldilocks feel, with too stiff feeling like it’s punching or hitting the strings with too soft feeling like sticky strings .
Acoustic vs. Electric
Pick width is typically based on the guitars string width. It’s SUPER counter intuitive but the thicker the string doesn’t always mean a ticker guitar pick. Acoustic strings tend to be a higher gauge (width/thick) but you’d typically use a thinner/lighter guitar pick to strum n pluck. Where-as electric strings don’t have to reverberate acoustically, that’s why they have pickup, so their strings tend to be a lower Guage (width/thin) yet electric players typically favor thicker guitar picks.
Acoustic Guitar Picks
.73 ~ .88mm for Regular Play Style
A nice goldilock’s balance of thick & thin to get a good strum n pluck without running into constant buzz from over doing it.
.38 ~ .48mm for Rhythm Play Style
Picks this thin have a LOT of give and take some getting used to but it gives you more room of volume from soft to a healthy strum. Choke down while picking-n-plucking & enjoy the airy ambiance.
Electric Guitar Picks
1mm to rule them all, & in the darkness binds them!
Really that’s the only size I use on electric anymore… I’ve tried a lot in the range of .88~1.2mm and here’s what I found! Anything over 1mm seems clunky and seemed to bash strings. Also pinching harmonics extremely difficult that thick only like it was rounded too much. On the other side of the coin, anything under 1mm seems bouncy like like strings pluck the pick more than the other way around…
Other
Fingerpicks
They’re designed for banjo’s but you can try plastic or metal finger picks to pluck strong while finger-picking songs. I prefer to just let my nails go a bit longer or if I’m really serious about recording/playing something glue on acrylics and file them down like guitar-fingerpicks
Thumbpicks
These are really useful for finger-picking but typically come too long for my taste. I’ll mod it slightly by using a metal file to take it down to a desired length then use a nail file to give it a final touch.
Bass Picks
Bass guitar is typically plucked with the index adlnd middle finger or a thicker pick like 1.2mm is used for some bass guitar.