Lauren Bateman teaches fingerpicking patterns for guitar beginners, starting with plucks (thumb and finger together) in eighth-note rhythms. She walks through exercises on G, C, and Fmaj7 chords, adds syncopated variations, and shows bass walkdowns like G to F# to Em with exact timing counts.
Hey, guitar enthusiasts. I'm going to show you how to add walkdowns into your playing. We're going to have so much fun in this lesson. But first I'm going to show you how to use other notes with the plucking technique. Let's get into it.
So if you just came from lesson four in my finger picking series, you learned the plucking technique. Now if you did not see that video, I'll put a link up there. Or you can scroll down to the link in the description below so that you can download the tabs and the course guide that goes with this entire series. So if you haven't gotten that yet, pause the video, go download that, and then come right back. So in the fourth lesson of the series, I taught you the pluck. Okay. Playing two fingers at the same time.
Kind of sounds like jeopardy. Right? Do.
Has like this jeopardy feel to it. So we got the pluck, but we're not. You wouldn't sit there and do that in a song. You wouldn't sit there and go.
I mean, maybe you would, but I've never seen it done. So what we're going to do is the pluck is usually used on the first beat and then we're going to play some other notes after it. So I'm going to show you how to play this using an eighth note pattern. So it'll be 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and and on 1 and 3 we're going to use this pluck and we're going to do something else in between to add some like filler to it. So let's look at the exercise. Let's start on a G chord. So the thumb on these exercises is just going to be playing one string. We're not going to be doing any alternating bass lines. We're just going to do single bass. And that's going to be the top string, okay. For this G chord or any six string chord. And the bottom strings are going to be doing M I, M A M I, M A. Okay. So when we do our pluck, it's going to be the thumb and the second finger at the same time. Okay?
That's what we're going to be doing. That's the exercise for G. So it's pluck I m a, Pluck I M A.
Okay. And that's what you can do for a six string chord. Now if I were going to do five string chords like a C chord, it's the same thing except you're just playing the bass note on the C. Now So it's.
Very easy way to fill in and make that pluck come alive and add some life to the rest of the chord for the rest of the measure. And let's check out our F major 7 chord. Now, in this instance, we are going to be using the thumb on the fourth string and we're going to be using fingers 1, 2, and 3 on the bottom strings here. So it's still going to be PM and then im.
So that's example one. Example two that I'm going to show you is we're only going to have one pluck per measure. So the first exercise is just getting used to you throwing the pluck in and adding in some extra notes. What we're going to do here, this is probably more what I would do in a song, but it's kind of like a syncopated pattern, which is why I didn't start with it. So we're playing eighth note patterns. And these eighth note patterns tend to have eight notes that we play well. In this particular pattern, we're actually only playing seven notes. We're skipping one of the notes and that could be tricky for some people timing wise, which is why I saved this more towards the end of the series. So what we're going to do is it's going to sound like this.
So I really like that one. It has a really nice sound to it. And you could play it slightly faster too if you had a song that was a little bit faster. But I like it because you get the pluck in there, but you get to play different notes over the chord. Now we're starting exactly the same as we did in the last example. It's just the last part of it is different. So if we take our G chord, we're still doing pluck. Okay. With P and M. And then it's M I, M A starts off the same thing, except we're not playing a note on the next beat. There's no note under the three beat. Okay. The next note comes on the and. Okay. So it's going to be and four and we're going to be playing M I, M I. So it's and four. So it's one and two and three and four. One and two and three and four. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. Okay.
And then f major 7.
Very, very nice sounding pattern that you could use over a song that's in what we would call four, four time. So now that I've showed you a couple of staggered plucking patterns, I wanted to show you a Very special technique that you'll hear a lot in finger picking. And that is the bass walk down. I'm just going to show you a couple examples here. And it's going to be a G chord walk down. So you'll be walking down from a G chord, playing the notes G, F sharp, E, and then a C chord walk down. So you'll be playing a C note to a B, not to an A note. Okay. And the great thing about finger picking is sometimes we only play the notes we need. Okay. If we go back to a song like Blackbird.
I'm not playing. Even though this is a G chord, I'm only playing one finger of the G chord because that's all I need. But you can see I'm only playing the notes that I need. So this is what we're going to do in part on these walk downs. That's why I went on that little tangent there. So when we play a G chord, we're going to play the bass note is G. Then we're going to move the first finger to the F sharp. That's our walk down note. So it's G, F sharp. And then we're going to end on an E minor chord. We're trying to bridge the gap between the G and the E minor. Great example.
Hallelujah.
Okay, that's in six, eight time. That's not in four, four time. But that's a great example. That walk down. We're walking down through the F sharp to the E minor. And then we're walking back up through the F sharp into the G. So what are some options that we can do for this in 4, 4 time is we can play the G note with the bass. And then we're gonna go. I am. So it's 1, 2 and. And then 3, 4, and. Okay. So you can hear these chords on these walk downs. They're splitting measures. So each chord is going to be two beats. 1, 2 and 3, 4. And so the second chord is kind of like a G slash, F sharp chord. Okay?
And then whatever you want to do on that e minor chord.
1 and 2 and 3 and 4, whatever you want to do as long as you are in time. You could also add a pluck into this. This is where I think a pluck actually could work really well playing it twice in a measure because of the lockdown.
Okay. So you get three plucks in a row on that E minor. Or maybe you just pluck the G.
All right? And you save the pluck just for the one note. I'm just showing you some options, all right? You're learning all the different techniques, and now you got to start playing around with your options to get better at different things. You can do the same thing with a C chord now, okay? So be a C chord. We'd be going to like, a C, C slash, B chord, and then an A minor chord, right? So B.
Okay. Whatever pattern you want to play on that full measured chord, it's whatever you want to play. So if you want to learn how to put together some of these techniques into a full song, go click on that video right there.
