Hey, how are you doing? Justin here.
Today we are going to start a little look at some fingerstyle. So, finger picking.
There's a whole module on this coming up but I thought as a little introduction,
a little taster we'd have a bit of a go as part of the Grade 2 Beginners
Course. Now, for this particular lesson we're just going to be looking at
6/8 time which is really nice as a taster for fingerstyle because we've got
this pattern where we can go thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1. So we're using thumb and
3 fingers. We don't tend to use the little finger for fingerstyle. Some
people do but it's kind of rare and a litle bit more difficult. Lot easier to
start off with just using the thumb and the first 3 fingers.
There's a whole bunch of songs that work really well for this that are not
too difficult. So it's a lovely pattern and if you really enjoy the fingerstyle
I know you're going to love the modules. One of the key things for starting
fingerstyle is realising that the fingers generally will be assigned a particular
string to play. Not all the time but for this kind of fingerpicking parttern
they've got an assigned string and the thumb will move around on the thickest 3
strings depending on what the chord is because it wants to play the bass note.
We're going to start off with a D chord. So for D chord, the thumb wants to play
the 4th string which is the note D. Now the pattern that I want you to start off
with is playing thumb, 1st finger, 2nd finger, 3rd finger, 2nd finger,
1rst finger, thumb. The count would be rhythmically 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6,
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
Now first thing I want to adress is whether you should be anchoring or
playing free. Now, with an anchor I would mean using your little finger
to rest on the actual guitar body while you pick the pattern.
Thumb, 1, 2, 3...OK? You can see little finger is set there anchoring
for the whole time.
Now I find using an anchor really, really difficult. My little finger is
very short and I find that it creates a lot of tension in my hand. So I
pretty much never use an anchor. But most of the guitar players that
I really love, that are great fingerstyle players like for example Tommy
Emmanuel, probably the greatest guitar player that's ever lived uses an anchor
when he plays fingerstyle. So my recommendation would be to use an
anchor if you can. At least start with it. When NITSUJ was learning this he used
an anchor. I'm still trying to force him into trying, seeing if he can
get going with an anchor but he having the same problem that I
have with my hand which is that it puts too much tension in may hand.
I would recommend gritting through a little bit of tension hoping that it
would come good. Because I do think it's kind of better, easier in the long
run if you play with an anchor. But most of the time you're gonna see me playing
free. So just my hand is resting, my nearest point of contact is my elbow
or my forearm on the guitar.
It does make it, particularly if I'm moving aroung it makes it a little bit
difficult. I something try and rest my whole forearm kind of on the guitar.
But There's only certain songs and certain stylistic things that I can do
that for. So my recommendation would be to get that anchor finger
down using the little finger actually resting on the body of the guitar.
Now the next question I always get is fingernails. Do you need fingernails?
Now I use fake fingernails like stick on acrylic nails for 20 years. I started
doing it when I was studying classical guitar where the nail thing is really
super important with the tone. I ended up taking my nails off when I had my
daughter just because I was sort of sharp and I kind of poke her a couple of times
and I said "No, this is not worth it". So I off and have been relearning
without nails and actually I think for the most part I like playing without
nails. I like the sound of this, it's a little bit warmer. One thing I'm finding
a bit tricky at the moment is because I'm doing the left-handed practice
NITSUJ, I got calluses on this hand in the wrong places. So when I'm
trying to pick the strings sometimes they kind of grab in a funny way
which is still kind if freaking me out and I'm looking foreward to not having
to do the left-handed practice to be able to get my fingerstyle back because I
love fingerstyle guitar and I'm finding that aspect a little bit challenging.
So I would recommend that you either have nails or you don't have nails.
But a combination won't work very well. If you've got one long fingernail
that one note would always be brighter and sharper than the rest and that will
sound wonky. So either want to cut all your nails nice and short or leave them
all long. If you do keep them all long so there making contact you will need
to get the nail filer to make sure they are very smooth and not catching
because it only takes a small little nook in the nail for it to catch on
the string and I'll have your nail off, most unpleasant.
So the first stage is being able to play the pattern. Just nice and slowly we're
going thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1. I'm talking the fingers now, finger numbers.
Thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1.
Now the first thing that you want to be trying to do when you're doing this
is feeling the strings under your fingers and trying to find the right position
where it feels like a nice contact with the strings. It's not getting caught.
it's not doing this sort of thing. You want to be thinking nice and smooth
contact with the strings. A really common beginner mistake that I see all the
time is grabbing at the strings and trying to pull them. So you are going
to see this...
where there's a whole heap of movement of the hand. The hand, the actual, the
knukles of the hand doing the fingerpicking should hardly be moving.
There's a little bit of movement there but it's not like this. You're not using your
hand and arm to pick the strings. By using just your fingers there, you get
lots of nicer contact with the strings. You start to feel, it's worth doing this
sort of thing for the feel. Putting your fingers on the strings. 1, 2 and 3 and
the thumb. And then just feeling...you can't leave 1rst finger down, while you
kind of can but...Just try and feel it, try and get... I can hit that calluse,
there's a calluse on that finger which keeps on there it's hooking.
So annoying. So just really trying to feel...try to make a nice contact...
Oh that third finger is really winding me up.
That's a bit better. I just angled the... you see I'm slightly changing the
angle here. If I go...if I go straight on like this, that tends to get a
grab as well. It is a little bit of an angle this way. My fingers are
pointing a little bit towards the front there. It's not just not pointing
staright down like this. There's definitely some angle there.
As well, you want your 1rst finger picking there, behind the thumb. OK?
So it doesn't want to be too like, well it can't be that way ahead otherwise
you'd be picking up. The further you go around this way, the thumb has to
come forward. You got to, again, for this kind of technique, everyone is
a little different. The shapes of our hand is a little different. So it's OK
for it to be a little different. You have to find what feels confortable
for you and you get a nice sound. And the getting a nice sound is really the
key thing here. You want to be thinking about the way your fingers are touching
the strings and how it's, how it feels and how it sounds. The'll probably be
together, where it feels nice under the fingers, where it feels smooth and
relaxed, that's where the sound will be the nicest. And a lot of that is
just practice and experimenting. So by doing it over and over again, I think,
you know, literally just sitting there practicing doing this.
It's a fantastic exercice for fingerstyle. Just on the one chord, without even
changing chords, not trying to do anthing fancy. Just really concentrating
on the tone of the notes. Trying to get the tone even and the rhythm
even. Now there are times where you might want to do a kind of interesting
rhythm, you might go...
Something like that but for practice you want to be thinking this
1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.
I mean it does make a difference as well where you pick. If I go back here...
It feels very different. It feels different at the fingers. It feels
a lot harsher.
Feels really hard for me to do it right up there. You can hear it's a lot rounder.
I always feel like this, like just at the back of the soundhole is the
right place. If your right over the soundhole, particularly on an
acoustic guitar you're going to end up muffling some of the sound that
should be projected out of the soundhole. So slightly at the back but
not too far back. You can experiment with those things. So we've got the
touch, super important how you're touching the note. Whether you're
using an anchor. Trying to find that nice sound where you're not
playing too hard, not playing too soft, enough to get the notes
sounding really sweet but not grabing at them. Potentially using
the anchor finger or not, it's something you should experiment
with. We've got the tone, like where we're playing up and down there,
the touch will influence the tone for sure but you want to experiment
a little bit with that, and the time. Getting that time really nice so
you've got that nice do, ba, ba, ta, ba, ba, do...and really trying to
fell that as a nice even rhythm is also going to lift your game
considerably. So I mentioned earlier as well the importance of the bass
note and the thumb playing the bass note. So for any D type chord,
so D and Dmin, you're going to be playing D, the open D string.
That's a Dmin7 and D7sus4 and any other D type chords, your thumb want to
be playing the 4th string. For a C chord, the note C is found there
on the 5th string. Same with Amin, that's also on the 5th string.
We have a G chord. Where the bass note is now the thickest string but note
the 1rst, 2nd and 3rd fingers are staying on the thinnest 3 strings.
Same with E and Emin. The thickest string is the bass note. OK?
So G type chords, bass note on the thickest string. Same with E, A type
chords, both Amaj and A minjor, minjor? What's that? Amaj and A min.
5th string, C chord has the 5th string and the D type chord, D shape chords will
have the bass note played on the 4th string. Now...
the first step is just going to be able to play it on one of those
chords. I don't recommend trying to change chords at the beginning.
Just be happy sticking on the one chord because what you're going
to find is when you start to change chords, it gets a little bit lumpy.
So you go D, then you go to G, you have to reform the chord, and it gets
pretty difficult. As you progress at this you'll find that sometimes you can
put your fingers down in an order that makes sense for the fingerpicking
pattern. Like for a G chord you're going to put that bass note down first.
So if you go from the D, when I go to the G, I can get the bass note, now
little finger goes down, little finger is just going down as I need it.
It's not recommended but that might help you. Because the difficulty with
most of the fingerstyle stuff, once you could do the pattern is keeping the
pattern consistent while the chords change. That becomes the thing that
is most difficult, most of the time when you're a beginner. It's not
actually just playing the changes. There are loads and loads of great beginner
fingerstyle song in 6/8. I think that the best one by quite some ways for
me is "Everybody Hurts", even if the bridge has got some bar chords
in it which you will be able to substitute for power chords in the next lesson.
So that might not be a bad song to be able to do knowing that your not
going to be playing the bridge yet. that's a nice one because the tempo
is pretty slow, it's just using D and G mainly, a little bit of
Emin, an A. It is exactly this pattern we've just talked about in 6/8.
If that's not to your taste "House of the Rising Sun" is quite a nice one
that involves the mini F which is of course is a bit challenging
when you're playing fingerstyle all of all the notes have to be picked
out clearly and if you've got your mini F and you've got any dead
notes it's gonna become very obvious. It's usually played a bit more up
tempo as well so if you're using my beginner song course app, then
you probably want to slow the tempo down a little bit or play it without
any sort of backing track. So just keep it nice and slow, but that's
a good one as well. Now "Halleluja" the Leonard Cohen, Jeff Buckley, Refus
Wainwright, covered by loads of people. Song is also a beautiful one in
fingerstyle but again that's using an F chord as well. I little bit depends
on what challenges you seek and how much you're going to enjoy
doing this. I think it's a fantastic and really fun thing to check out
fingerstyle on the acoustic guitar, but it also works on electric.
There are a couple of like, you know, relatively unknown guitar
players, one is called Martin Knopfler and the other one is called Jeff Beck,
who both play electric guitar fingerstyle. I don't think it really catched on, I'm
not really sure whether they'll make it as guitar players because
playing fingerstyle on electric guitar ah, it just doesn't work
does it. You know. Of course it works on electric guitar as well,
you know. There are great examples of people playing fingerstyle on
electric guitar. The particular pattern that I'm showing you now
is more of an acousticky style thing I suppose but there are definitely
examples of electric guitars being played fingerstyle that are absolutely
as good as it gets stuff. So if your an electric guitar player, don't
just skip over the fingerstyle thing and think that you should ignore it.
So my recommendation is literally stick to that one pattern for the
first few practice session. Just work on one chord at a time, really concentrate
on how your fingers are feeling as there connecting with the strings.
How the tone is. How your timing is, trying to keep it consistent. When you
feel ok with that maybe start incorporate, try and play a song, maybe just
one chord change like "Everybody Hurts" going D to G. Experiment
with that for a little bit. If you're feeling a bit more adventurous you
can start trying to play a whole song and start to incorporate other
chord changes. But you're much better off building this kind of
exercice slowly and getting it each step of the way nice and solid,
rather than just trying to just jump straight into playing "House of the
Rising Sun" with all of those chord changes, messing up the rhythm
of it all the time and, you know, it becomes a lot more difficult
and I don't think it's as much fun. You're much better off keeping it
one step at a time and building a nice solid foundation.
Really appreciate your support, let me know how your getting
on with the exercices. If your on the website let me know
in the comments. I will be trying to respond and help
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all of this and I'll see you with plenty more very soon.
You all take care of yourselves and each other. Bye.