Best guitar picks for beginners

Buy thin picks, buy a dozen, and buy a variety pack first if you have never deliberately tried a gauge. Gauge — the thickness, printed in millimeters on the pick — is the whole decision, and it is the one thing nobody tells a new player. A thin pick flexes and absorbs an inconsistent strumming hand. A heavy pick transmits every unevenness straight into the strings, which is exactly what a beginner does not need. The pick that came in your starter pack was chosen by a purchasing department, not for you.

Every pick states its Starter Path band, and we have not played any of them — the method is on how we pick. Gauges, materials, grip construction, SKUs and UPCs come from Dunlop’s own product pages and from Guitar Center where Dunlop’s descriptive copy is reproduced, cited at the bottom. Where we could not verify something — noted below — this page says so instead of printing it.

Why gauge matters more than everything else combined

A pick is a lever between your hand and six strings, and its thickness decides how much of what your hand does actually reaches them.

A thin pick bends as it crosses the strings. That flex does two useful things for a beginner: it smooths out the uneven attack of a strumming hand that is still learning, and it reduces the chance of catching a string and stopping dead mid-strum. The cost is definition — a thin pick cannot deliver a crisp single note, because it gives way before the string does.

A heavy pick barely flexes. Every bit of timing error, every uneven downstroke, goes straight into the string, so a strummed chord from an inexperienced hand sounds exactly as lumpy as the hand was. What you gain is attack and control on individual notes, which is why lead players use them.

A first year of guitar is overwhelmingly strummed chords. So the honest recommendation runs opposite to intuition: the beginner wants the flexible pick, and “medium” is not the safe middle choice it sounds like. Our guitar accessories page has said this for some time — it is where this page came from — and it never named a pick to buy.

Grip: the variable nobody mentions

Ask a new guitarist what is going wrong and a surprising number will say the pick keeps twisting in their fingers, or shoots out mid-song. That is not a skill problem that needs practicing through; it is usually the material.

Dunlop publishes a whole taxonomy of pick materials — Tortex, Nylon, Max-Grip, Jazz, Herco, Gator Grip, Celluloid, Ultex, Primetone, Delrin 500, Flow, Finger & Thumb and Stubby. For a beginner, three of them matter:

Celluloid is the traditional glossy pick, and it is the slickest common material. It is also what is in most starter packs, which is an unfortunate combination for someone who has not developed a grip yet.

Tortex is Dunlop’s Delrin-based formula, matte rather than glossy, which grips dry fingers noticeably better. Dunlop describes it as highly durable with great memory and just the right amount of flexibility, still made to the original formula in Benicia, California. “Memory” is the useful part of that claim: it returns to shape instead of staying bent.

Nylon is grippier again and more flexible than Tortex at the same thickness. The Max-Grip version goes further and molds a non-slip texture into the entire gripping surface — an engineered coarse grid rather than a coating that can wear off.

The picks

Dunlop’s Light/Medium variety pack#ad is the first purchase, and it is first for a reason that applies to almost nobody reading a specification: gauge preference is discovered by playing, not chosen by reading. Twelve picks across Dunlop’s light and medium gauges in a mix of materials settles both the gauge and the grip question in one evening, for less than a set of strings. Dunlop designates the pack Light/Medium and does not publish a model-by-model breakdown, so we are not claiming one. Buy this if you have never deliberately compared gauges. Skip it if you already know your gauge — a dozen of that one is cheaper and means you always have the pick you like.

Tortex Standard .60 mm#ad is the thin gauge to settle on for chord strumming, and the matte Tortex surface is a real upgrade in grip over the glossy pick in the bag. Dunlop publishes a SKU and UPC per gauge (418-060 for this one), which means you can confirm you are buying .60 mm rather than guessing from a photo. Buy these if you have established that thin suits you and you mostly play chords. Skip them if you are starting to pick out single notes — at .60 mm the pick gives way before the string does, and the notes lose their edge.

Max-Grip Nylon .60 mm#ad is the answer to a specific and very common first-month problem. The non-slip texture is molded into the whole gripping surface, with a molded quick-release edge, and it costs the same as the plain Tortex — so the grip is effectively free. Buy these if the pick rotates or escapes, or the player has sweaty hands. Skip them if the pick is already staying put: the grid is genuinely abrasive and some players find it unpleasant over a long session, and nylon at .60 mm is one of the floppiest combinations here.

Tortex Standard .73 mm#ad is the yellow one, and probably the most-used guitar pick in the world. It is in the “enough” band rather than the floor because of timing, not quality: .73 mm is the genuine all-rounder — stiff enough to define a single note, flexible enough to strum a chord — and it is where a player goes once their strumming hand has stopped fighting the guitar. Buy these if strumming is solid and single-note playing is starting. Skip them if this would be a first pick. Buying medium first is the commonest mistake in this category, because “medium” sounds like the sensible default and instead makes a beginner’s strumming sound worse than it is.

Two things we are not telling you, because we could not check them

Worth stating plainly on a page built on published specifications.

The full Tortex color chart. Dunlop color codes Tortex gauges across the line, which is genuinely useful — you can identify a pick’s thickness at a glance and re-buy the same one without reading a label. But we could only confirm two pairings from sources we actually retrieved: .73 mm is yellow, and 1.0 mm is blue. Rather than publish a chart from memory we have left it at that. The thickness is printed on the pick itself anyway.

What is inside the variety pack. Dunlop designates it Light/Medium, and that is all we can verify. No model-by-model contents list appears on any source we could retrieve, so if you need specific models, buy them individually.

One pick is not a universal pick

Worth knowing before you apply this page to the rest of a household’s instruments, because the answers genuinely differ.

A mandolin wants a far stiffer pick than a guitar — around 1.4 mm — because it is driving eight steel strings at high tension over a short scale, and a thin pick flexes instead of moving them. That is the only pick already in our registry, on the mandolin accessories page, and its own write-up says plainly that it is the wrong object for a six-string acoustic: loud, stiff and unsubtle.

A ukulele goes the opposite way. Nylon strings are normally played with the fingers, and where a pick is used it is usually soft felt — a hard plastic pick sounds harsh on nylon and can score the strings.

A bass takes heavier picks again, and many bassists use fingers exclusively. Dunlop sells a separate bass variety pack for exactly this reason.

What we did not list, and why

Unbranded bulk picks. A hundred picks for a few dollars is tempting and it is the one purchase on this page we would actively avoid. They typically carry no printed thickness, so you cannot tell what you are playing or re-buy what you liked — and since a branded dozen costs about six dollars, the saving is not real.

Ultex, Primetone, Jazz and the premium lines. All real Dunlop families and all aimed at players who already know what they want from a pick. Our own mandolin page uses a Primetone, which is a good illustration: it is an excellent pick and it is excellent for something that is not beginner guitar strumming.

Metal, stone and exotic-wood picks. They exist, they are expensive, and at this stage they are jewelry. Metal picks also wear strings faster.

Thumb picks and fingerpicks. A different technique rather than a different pick, and worth exploring when a player deliberately takes up fingerstyle or banjo rather than as a first purchase.

Pick holders that stick to the guitar. Adhesive on a finish is a risk for a benefit you can get from a pocket. If picks keep vanishing, the fix is owning twelve, not gluing something to the instrument.