Welcome to the club, you’ve lost your pick inside your guitar again.
Before you start shaking your guitar around like a madman you figured you search around for a better method.
While there are some great methods for getting your guitar pick out of your acoustic guitar, shaking it is unfortunately one of the best methods.
Nonetheless, let’s go over some other proven methods for retrieving your guitar picks.
How to get your guitar pick out of an acoustic guitar.
If you’re strumming along and the pick slips from your fingers, there’s a good chance the pick will fall into the sound hole.
The sound hole on guitars seem to be the perfect size combination of big enough for the pick to fall into, yet too small to get your hand in to easily retrieve your lost pick.
My personal favorite method of getting a pick out of an acoustic guitar is this:
- Lay the guitar flat on your lap with the strings facing up, so you can see inside of the sound hole.
- Tilt and shimmy the guitar around until you can position the lost pick on the bottom of the inside, right below the sound hole.
- Quickly flip the guitar over, if done quick enough, and with enough centrifugal force, the pick should fall right out, into your lap.
I prefer this method as I’m not shaking my guitar around like a crazy person.
Not that it isn’t a solid method, but I feel like there is a little concern for the stress you might put on the guitar neck when shaking your guitar around like that.
I’m sure that’s a little overly cautious, however, certainly possible that while shaking the guitar it puts unnecessary stress on the neck of the guitar
Getting a guitar pick out of a small sound hole
Some guitars might be a little more challenging to get your pick out of.
Not all guitars have round sound holes that you can stick your hands into.
Notably, some guitars have what are called “F holes”.
F holes are a design practice borrowed from violin style instruments where they did not want the hole directly under the strings.
The good news with F holes is that they tend to be much smaller and harder for you to lose your guitar pick in.
The flip side of that benefit is that IF and WHEN you do lose your guitar pick in a F hole, you’re in for a real problem of retrieving your pick.
You’re likely going to have to resort to the tried and trusted “shake your guitar like mad” method of pick retrieval.
Getting your guitar picks out of your guitar isn’t always easy, but some guitar will make the process much easier than others.
Sometimes you might lose one and just accept that your guitar has eaten it with no intention of ever giving it back, but hey, that’s rock and roll baby.
