Learn Finger Picking for Guitar

Hey, everyone, welcome back. In this series of videos, we're going to talk about finger picking. So instead of using a pick in our hand, we're going to actually use our fingertips to play the strings on the guitar. Now, there's a couple of housekeeping things I want to go over before we go into the actual course content itself. So first, let's talk about the placement of the hand. So the hand is not going to be back here by the bridge, and it's not really going to be in the front by the sound hole. It's kind of going to end up in the back of the sound hole because if you play back here.

Your strings are going to sound kind of tinny as opposed to getting a warmer sound up closer by the sound hole. So you want your hand to rest kind of on this back part of the sound hole. That's where your fingertips are going to be. Now, in finger picking, we have what's called pima, P I, M, A. And each letter represents a finger. So the thumb is P, the index finger is I, the middle finger is M, and the ring finger is a p, I, m, a. So on some of the PDFs, you're going to see these letters. So that will tell you which finger finger to use. Sometimes I might refer to them as thumb, 1, 2, 3, because that's what I use a lot with my students. But I will try to reference the pima as much as possible for you guys. Now, the fingers usually kind of have geography that they cover on the guitar. So the thumb is mostly responsible for the top three strings. So the sixth, fifth and fourth strings, those are our notes. And the thumb is usually alternating between these bass notes. Meanwhile, the other fingers, I, M, A, are on the bottom three strings. So your first finger, your index finger, is responsible for the G string. Your middle finger, or M, is responsible for the B string, and your ring finger is responsible for the bottom string, the bottom E string. And this is your A finger. So if I were to play the thumb, the first finger, second and third, it would be P I, M, A. So it's P, I, M A. And that's each finger kind of playing a bass note with the thumb, the G string, the B string, and the E string. Okay, those are kind of what your fingers are doing now. A bad habit, just to make you aware of it, because it's something I still have the bad habit of doing. Because I mostly taught myself to play guitar. I didn't get guitar lessons until much later. I've probably already been playing for 10 years and I still sometimes have the bad habit of locking the pinky onto the body of the guitar. It's better to play without the pinky on the guitar because this kind of creates tension. You can make it work. I've done it for years. But it's way more comfortable to do it without.

So if you can do it without putting the pinky down, I highly recommend that you not get into that bad habit because it still sometimes creeps in on me and I have to correct myself over and over again. So don't lock your hand, don't lock your palm or anything on the guitar. Keep it relaxed and just let the fingers do the work.

So what we're going to do is we're going to go over some exercises to help build up the dexterity in your finger picking hand so that you can do some of the patterns we're going to talk about. So we'll get into just basic arpeggios. We'll get into some other non traditional patterns. We'll do some block picking.

And you know, we'll do Travis picking, which is a very common picking pattern.

Very, very commonly used. But first, you know, we're going to have to build your hand up to being able to do some of those intricate and fun things with finger picking. So let's get into our first exercise in the next video.