How many different ways are there to pick a guitar?

There are a few ways I’m going to quickly talk about here, but everyday guitarists are getting more and more creative creating new ways to play the guitar

Here are a few

A difficult but thrilling sound is sweep picking, often associated with rock or metal riffs. This is a very quick style of striking all strings in a successive manner both up strum and down strumming can be used when sweeping. Take a look at the 1st pic below

Next up is raking. This is similar to sweeping except we sweep over muted strings before creating a tone. For example, let’s say you desire an A note on the 4th string 7th fret, well you mute the 5th and 6th string, ‘rake’ over those first before getting to the desired A note. Take a look below to see how this is notated

Next on the list is palm muting. This gets the desired pitch, because you are fretting the note, except your strumming hand is palm muting the note to give the tone a muffled effect. This is notated with a giant P.M. above the desired note, as illustrated below. Also, if the guitar tab calls for multiple palm muted notes, they’ll write out a bunch of dashes after the first one (ie. P.M. – – – – -)

Next up is tremolo picking! Again, associated more so with metal music, this is a rapid succession of a single note. This can sound really cool with some fun effects on an electric guitar. These are notated on tablature with 3 slanted lines above the note, as illustrated below

Pick scrap is an uncommonly used technique but can give a very fun dissonant sound to a riff. As you can probably guess, this is where you literally scrap the string, not perpendicular to the string like normal strumming, but horizontally along the string. Kind of a nails on the chalk board sound. Check it out below

Lastly are arpeggios! This is like a sweep, except with a chord. This is different from a regular strum because each note should sound distinct and is illustrated with a squiggly line below