In this YouTube lesson, Lauren Bateman teaches a fingerpicking arrangement of Sting’s “Fields of Gold.” She begins by listing the chord set (G, D, A, G/B, B minor) and explains how the song avoids full bar chords by using a specific fingerpicking pattern that plays an eighth‑note arpeggio on each beat. She demonstrates the pattern for six‑string (G), five‑string (B minor, A) and four‑string (D) chords, showing thumb‑bass and three‑finger melody motions, and then introduces a two‑beat “walk‑down” (G/B → A) that uses a shortened pattern. Throughout, she emphasizes steady eighth‑note timing, encourages learners to keep playing through mistakes, and offers practice tips such as slowing playback with the video settings. After a brief bridge demonstration, she does a full playthrough while a second speaker sings the lyrics. Bateman closes by introducing herself as a teacher focused on older adult learners, urging viewers to use the slower‑playback option, to keep playing through errors, and to explore her free fingerpicking playlist for further fundamentals.
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Hey guitar enthusiasts, Lauren Bateman here. I have a really great song by Sting called Fields of Gold, and I'm gonna teach you how to fingerpick this song because I think it's a really great song that should be fingerpicked. You can also strum it, but I'm gonna show you how to make it sound really good. Now the great thing about this song is we don't need to play full bar chords. All right, it's definitely not a beginner song, but you won't need bar chords, and that's because of the fingerpicking pattern we're gonna use. So the chords we need in this song are gonna be a G chord, there's gonna be a D chord, there's gonna be an A chord, there's also gonna be a G/B chord, or sorry, G, yeah, G/B chord, which is a G chord but with a B note in the bass. We're gonna use that for a walk down, so I'll show you how to play that. And the last one's gonna be B minor. Now I know what you're saying, Lauren, but B minor is a bar chord. Well, the way we're picking this, we don't need the high E string. So you do not have to bar the chord. You can just use your 4 fingers and play the strings A, okay, D, G, and B. And you don't have to bar that 1st finger. You can leave that high E string open because we don't need it. All right, so it technically eliminates the need for bar chords in this song. So now that you know the chords we're gonna be using, let's jump into the fingerpicking pattern. So this song is in four-four time, which means we are going to count to four: one, two, three, four; one, two, three, four. Every chord except for the walk down has four beats. Okay, and we are just subdividing it into eight notes. So it's going to be counted one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and and we're going to be playing a note for every single one of those beats. So let me just play really quick what we're going to be learning, and then we're going to break it down step by step. So if I play this over the verse, it's a nice ballad, so there's no need to rush this. You'll remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley. You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky. We walk in fields of gold. It's a little low for my voice, but I'm going to try and make it work as best As possible. You can hear, sounds really nice, and you got to hear that walk down and how that comes in and how we're gonna play that. So let's talk about this picking pattern. It's gonna change for each chord slightly depending on if the chord is 6 strings, um, 5 strings, which would technically be your B minor or your A chord, or 4-string chord, which is gonna be your D chord. Okay, let's start with the G chord because that's probably the easiest one to play, right? So we'll start with the G chord. So a lot of it's just open strings. So we're gonna do our thumb is gonna own the bass. Okay, the bass right here is the lowest note of the string. And then my first finger is gonna be on the D string. My second finger is gonna be on the G string, and my third finger is going to be on the B string. Okay, so if you just played thumb 1, 2, 3, just do that. It's basically the first half of the pattern. 1 and 2 and. Okay, 1 and 2 and, 1 and 2 1 and 2 and. You can also play the bright G, gives it a slightly brighter sound. So I'm going to let you choose which one you prefer to hear, either the darker G or the brighter G. Either one works for me. Okay, I'm going to play the regular G for— so that it matches up with my tab. Okay, so we got 1 and 2 and, and then we're just going to work backwards. Okay, so we've played Thumb, one, two, three, and then we're gonna go two, one, thumb, one. Okay, thumb, one, two, three. Okay, and then backwards: two, one, thumb, one. Thumb, one, two, three. Two, one, thumb, one. Thumb, one, two, three. Two, one, thumb, one. Okay, so that's the pattern. Let's play it without me talking. Here we go: one, two. 3, 4. Okay. Now for the B minor chord, it's going to be the same exact thing except the thumb is now moving down to the A string because that's the bass note of a 5-string chord. Okay, this B note here is the bass note of a B minor chord. So now we're just gonna play the same thing. Thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, thumb, 1. Okay, it's just over a B minor chord now. And again, we're not playing that high E string, so we don't have to bar the chord, which makes it nice. Okay, so let's try that. So 2, 3, 4. Thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, thumb, 1. Thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, 1, thumb, 1. Okay, so that is our B minor chord. Now our D chord. Okay, we're gonna shift our whole hand down. Okay, so our thumb is now gonna be on the D string, our first finger is gonna be on the G string, our second finger is gonna be on the B string, and now our third finger is gonna be high, high E string. Okay, and it's the same pattern. 1, thumb, 1. Okay, so six string chord. Okay, the B minor and the D, the four string. Okay. Those are our options right there. We're going to use that throughout the entire song. But there is one point in the verses where that change, and it does show up on the bridge a couple times as well. We have this split measure of G/B and A. Now for this walk down, I do kind of like the brighter G for this. So this is the part: You'll forget the sun in his jealous sky. As we walk in fields of gold. Okay, so what are we doing here? There's a walk down. Each of these chords is 2 beats. All right, that means 4 notes. We're gonna be playing 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. And so G/B is gonna be thumb 1, 2, 3, and then the A chord is gonna be thumb 1, 2, 3. Okay, so that's gonna be strings A, D, G, B. Okay, so it's gonna be A D G B A D G B, then back to the regular pattern. Almost sounds like Kryptonite by— it probably is— Three Doors Down. When I hear that note, that's what I kind of think of. So those are all the different little picking patterns we're gonna use. So let's try throwing that walk down in. So we're gonna go from a G chord. So it's gonna be our little G pattern, and then we're gonna do G/B. A, B. Okay, so let's try that. Ready? Starting from the G chord. 1, 2, 3, and 4. M. Okay, so that's a transition. You might need to pause the video and practice going through that, working through the G chord with the regular pattern The half patterns on the walk down and then coming back into that B minor chord. All right, so first what I'm going to do is I'm going to play this bridge section before we do a full playthrough. I've kind of already played the verse for you once, and we're going to go through this bridge section. It's mostly G and D, makes it nice and easy for us. And also, again, if you want to use the bright G, it allows you to have a pivot point to get back into the D. And since it's a bridge, I feel like this part comes up a little bit, so it sometimes benefits from the brightness of that G, but it'll make the transition. You can just pivot around that third finger going from the four-finger G chord to a D chord. Okay, so that bridge is going to sound like this. I never made promises lightly, and there have been some that I've broken. I swear in the days still left, we will walk in fields of gold. We will walk in fields of gold. Okay, so you can hear how that walk down comes in twice. Now you might have heard I made a mistake. I forgot to transition my fingers when I— after I went to that D chord, I forgot I forgot to move them for the G chord. But you know what? You're not really playing anything wrong as long as you are— as long as you keep that arpeggio going and you keep your timing. It really doesn't matter what strings you play. Okay, that's the great thing about fingerpicking and doing something like this. As long as you stay in an 8th note rhythm, meaning your timing is solid, and you are playing a note within the chord, it's not going to sound bad. So if you do exactly what I did and you play the wrong fingers on the wrong strings, guess what? It's okay. It's not wrong. It's not wrong because you're still playing notes that are in the chord, so it's going to sound good no matter what. So even if you make a mistake, don't worry about it. It might not be a mistake at all. The whole, the whole key is to just keep playing. All right, even if you mess up a little bit on the playthrough, just try and keep up with me. Try to keep playing with me. So what we're going to do now is we're going to do a full playthrough, but before we do that, I just want to quickly introduce myself. If you don't know who I am, my name is Lauren Bateman and I specialize in helping older adults learn to have fun with the guitar and play songs that they know and love, just like this Sting song here. My goal is to break things down, make the guitar make sense, and allow you to just have more fun playing your guitar, which is what we're going to do now. Now, if you need to use the settings cog to slow me down, to go even slower, please do that. All right, and remember, if you make a mistake, don't worry, don't go back to the beginning, just keep playing, trying to work through the mistake. You learn a lot As a musician by playing through your mistakes as opposed to stopping and then going back to the beginning. You remember me when the west wind moves upon the fields of barley.
You forget the sun in his jealous sky as we walk in fields of gold. So she took her love for to gaze awhile upon the fields of barley. In his arms she fell as her hair came down among the fields of gold. Will you stay with me? Will you be my love among the fields of barley? We'll forget the sun, it is just sky as you lie in fields of gold. See the western move like a lover's song. Sow upon the fields of barley. Feel her body rise as you kiss her mouth among the fields of gold. I never made promises lightly, and there have been some I broke. I swear the days still left, we will walk in fields of gold. We will walk in fields of gold.
So there you go, there's a little bit of a playthrough for you to work on this song. And again, just use the settings cog to slow me down. And if you really enjoyed fingerpicking, I highly recommend you check out my fingerpicking series. Right over here where I teach you a lot of the basic and fundamentals of becoming a better fingerpicker, and it's absolutely free. Go check out that playlist right over there right now.
