Originally Posted by: johnpnj1
Is there a trick or technique I can learn to help with this?

This is a normal for all beginner guitarists. :)

In the early stages of learning you have to completely develop your fine motor skills. The only way to do this is focus & repetition. Practice, practice & more practice!

Anchoring your pinky or ring finger is fine. Anchoring your palm & whole arm is fine. Just having a free floating arm & hand is also fine! Guitarists have developed clean, smooth, efficient picking with any & all of those.

The main thing is to practice smarter by really drilling on those specifics that help you gain those fine motor skills quicker. You need to spend time playing a lot of single string exercises & work toward making the smallest possible, efficient hand motions.

So play single note melodies, or simple C major scale exercises. But focus on minimizing your picking strokes. Keep your hand very close to the strings & just use very small motion from your hand & fingers to strike the string to sound note. Then come back across the string to reset. Or if you are working on alternate picking, then strike the string with very small motion, stop & reverse motion to go back across the string.

Work toward minimizing motion until you have a smooth efficient natural picking technique.

Repeat. A lot. :)

I cover basic single note picking technique in this tutorial. Hope this helps. Have fun!

https://www.guitartricks.com/tutorial.php?input=742