Learning to Fingerpick the Guitar

I think first it helps to identify what sort of music you want to play, though if you don’t know yet that is fine. There are kind of two schools of thought when it comes to picking hand position. The first are those play alot of alternating bass, and perhaps wear a thumbpick at times. Alternating bass style sounds best if you slightly mute the bass strings with the heel of your hand, which means dropping your wrist, which in turn puts your fingers at a different angle to the strings. I personally can’t play this way, it feels awkward picking the strings with my fingers and that i have no power. But i don’t play much alternating bass music, so don’t take my word for it. People like Chet Atkins, Merle Travis, and Tommy Emmanuel certainly don’t sound awkward.

The other position is a more classical position, with the wrist raised a bit, which to me gives the fingers power to pluck the strings. The finger plucks the string at an angle, not parallel, pivoting from the big knuckle, and drawing the tip of the finger back towards the palm. Be sure to keep enough tension in your finger joints so they don’t extend to much, which would cause you to brush the next adjacent string on your way back. I still have trouble with this. Try not to bounce off the string or bring the finger up after you pluck it, always follow through to the base of the palm. This may take some work.

So i just wanted to distinguish between those two schools of playing. Neither one is right or wrong, it just depends what kind of music you want to play. Some folks see musicians with a thumbpick and just think thats the only way to play, others think you have to study classical guitar. While i always feel some basic classical guitar training is good, both from a technique standpoint plus the advantage of learning to read music, it may not make sense if someone wants to learn to play alternating bass or country blues.

Moving onto simple songs. Besides the alternating bass lessons presented in the beginning of this post, i like House of the Rising Sun as a simple fingerpicking guitar song. It gets you in the mindset of assigning a certain finger to each string. We have a free lesson here which outlines the chords. For fingerpicking you are going to want to assign your index finger to the 3rd string, your middle finger to the 2nd string, and your ring finger to the 1st string. The main fingerpicking pattern for House of the Rising Sun involves what is called an appregio for the right hand. Lets take the first chord, A minor. You thumb is going to pluck the open 5th string, and then you will pluck the 3rd, 2nd, and 1st strings consecutively with the assigned fingers. The pattern is the same for all the other chords, except that the string the thumb plucks is going to change depending on the chord. The main rule of thumb, (pardon the pun), is that the string is the lowest note of the chord. So for the D chord its the open 4th string, for the F chord its the fretted 6th string, etc.

If folks are thinking about learning to take up fingerpicking guitar i hope that gives you some good basic information.