Thank you once again to John Little from GuitarTricks.com for another great guest post, this time an introduction to fingerstyle guitar:
Fingerstyle guitar lessons give you the power to take basic chords, break them into pieces and reconstruct them in a more interesting form for your progression. You’ll have probably learned arpeggios in the past, and in essence fingerstyle is pretty much the same technique, except you use your fingers as picks instead of your overworked plectrum. The effect of this is that you have the ability to create more intricately-layered melodies and incorporate simultaneous bass and melody lines into your compositions. This fingerstyle guitar lesson introduces you to the techniques and skills you’ll need to play in the style.
Labeling Your Fingers
Before you start to learn fingerstyle guitar, it’s important to address one of the new challenges it poses for tablature. Think about it; since you ordinarily hit everything with your pick, fingerstyle would basically be a free-for-all (using whichever finger you felt like) when you’re first learning. To address this problem (and show you the best method of playing fingerstyle passages), each of your fingers needs a tablature-friendly label.
Since classical guitar makes use of fingerstyle playing, the names for your digits are taken from the (admittedly archaic) musical language of Latin. This means that your thumb is shown with “P” (pollux), your index with an “I” (indicis), your middle finger with an “M” (medius) and your ring finger with an “A” (annularis). Little fingers are rarely used in fingerstyle, so it isn’t included in the labeling system. Now you’re ready to learn fingerstyle guitar – all you really have to remember is the unusual symbols for your thumb and ring finger. Of course, this labeling system has long been the standard; otherwise modern guitarists would have undoubtedly switched them for “T” and “R” by now.
Don’t worry about the length of your nails for now. There is a lot of discussion about the optimum nail length for fingerstyle guitar playing, but in reality it’s more a matter of preference. Some fingernail length will help you strike the strings more precisely, but specific lengths aren’t really worth worrying about for now. You can even by some “finger picks” – which are basically like finger-mounted plectrums – if you prefer.
Basic Pattern
Fingerpicking patterns tell you the order you should play the different notes from the chord, which means they can be applied to any chord. The simplest one to tackle works just like an arpeggio, except you get some experience with the different roles your fingers take on as part of a pattern. As a general rule, your thumb plays the notes one the lower three strings (the E, A and D strings) and your index, middle and ring take the three higher ones, but feel free to change this up if it helps in a specific pattern. For now, follow the suggested fingering as you play through the tab.
Practice the fingerstyle pattern above until you’re comfortable using your fingers independently. When you’re comfortable with the pattern, try to apply it to a different chord. Note that this pattern is based around a C major chord, so the first note picked is the low root – basically the lowest note of the chord you play. Play the same pattern, but over an A minor shape. Now try to change the pattern to suit a G chord. On six-string chords, find the root note on the low E string where possible. Using this technique, you can build chord progressions into your fingerstyle playing.
Here’s another example picking pattern, which illustrates how using different patterns creates a different effect.
Thumb Independence
One of the most important fingerstyle guitar lessons you can learn is about thumb independence. Your fingers are tasked with keeping the melody going, but your thumb is the powerhouse that holds the main beat. Working first on keeping your thumb rocking separately, you’ll soon pick up the basics of Travis picking – a useful style as you learn fingerstyle guitar.
First, choose a chord (say A minor) and work on alternating between the two bass notes. Keep the rhythm even when you play, counting out the beats (“one and two and three and four and”) and plucking the notes at the appropriate points in the bar (when you say each number).
All of the notes in the example above are thumb-picked. You can change the E note on the D string for the open E string, if you prefer. This might seem very basic, but you need to keep up that regular, rocking rhythm throughout the other examples in this fingerstyle lesson.
Build in a “pinch” to add a melody note into the fingerstyle pattern. “Pinches” are when you play to notes at the same time with different fingers, so the notation is doubled-up accordingly.
So far, the Travis fingerpicking pattern only has notes on the beats, with all of the off-beats (the “ands”) still free for a note. So we can add these notes in to create a more complicated guitar fingerstyle pattern.
Get to grips with the Travis fingerpicking pattern, and then practice applying it to different chords in the same way as you did with the previous patterns. To play more complex fingerstyle guitar patterns, you can build in legato techniques or skip some beats for a unique rhythm.
Playing Songs
The best thing to do when you learn fingerstyle guitar is to try to apply the patterns you’ve learned to different songs. If you have a song you’d like to learn on the guitar, use open chords and create a fingerpicking pattern for it. This will give you practice working through a chord progression in fingerstyle and putting together your own patterns. Use the basic Travis picking method if you want to keep things simple, but you can pretty much use any pattern as long as you’re in time and you work around the root note of each chord. You can use other fingerstyle guitar lessons if you’re stuck for patterns – but you should be able to come up with loads of your own!
About The Author
Founded in 1998, Guitar Tricks was the Web’s first multimedia guitar lesson site. 15 years later, Guitartricks.com features over 40 guitar instructors continuously creating a massive library of online video guitar lessons (6,000+) covering every musical style, technique, and level of ability. John has played guitar for several years and is excited to contribute his and Guitar Tricks’ knowledge to this blog!
Thank you once again to John Little from GuitarTricks.com for another great guest post, this time an introduction to fingerstyle guitar:
Fingerstyle guitar lessons give you the power to take basic chords, break them into pieces and reconstruct them in …
