The Best Way To Start Playing Fingerstyle Guitar For Beginners
Intro
Do you like listening to fingerstyle guitar music artists like Bob Dylan, Chet Atkins, Tommy Emmanuel, Ben Walker, Ben Howard or any other blues, folk or acoustic rock guitarists who play guitar with their fingers?
If you do, and you are a beginner on guitar, you are probably wondering what the best way for you is to start playing fingerstyle (or fingerpicking as some call it) guitar styles. This article will attempt to answer that question!
Exercises
To get started playing fingerstyle guitar, you can start getting your picking hand fingers used to playing the open strings using some simple exercises. The first two of these exercises are even easier than playing any chords, scales or melodies because they are all on open strings! So these could easily be the very first things you ever play on guitar, and you’ll be on the right path to becoming a fingerstyle master!
Fingerstyle Exercise 1
With the guitar in a comfortable position, use your picking hand to play the Low E (6th) String with your thumb, the G (3rd) string with your index finger, the B (2nd) string with your middle finger, the High E (1st) string with your ring finger, and then use the same fingers in the opposite direction. Here is the tab:
You might notice that the first exercise sounds like the start to Metallica’s “Nothing Else Matters”. You are making music already!
Play this exercise on a loop for a few minutes, at a slow enough speed that you can get the notes consistently and evenly. Once you can do that, speed up gradually, keeping your hand and shoulders relaxed. This will gradually build your fingerstyle strength and dexterity.
Note: from now on we’ll abbreviate the right hand fingering, to “t”, “i”, “m”, and “r”, which stands for thumb, index, middle, and ring.
Fingerstyle Exercise 2:
To progress with your fingerstyle technique, you can move on to exercise 2. This is the same except now your thumb alternates picking different strings.
Make sure the notes are all ringing out all the time. Don’t stop any string from ringing – this means once you have played a string, don’t touch it again until the next time you play it. For this your hand must hover over and near the strings but not touching them.
Fingerstyle Exercise 3:
This time you will hold down the chord Am, and play strings 5 3 2 1 2 3 4 3 2 1 2 3, then switch to Em and play strings 6 3 2 1 2 3 5 3 2 1 2 3.
It’s the bass notes which are changing here, the higher notes of the chord remain the same.
Mastery
Although these exercises are simple, you can build great strength in your fingerstyle technique by playing them:
- From very slow to very fast using a metronome
- From very quiet to very loud making sure every note is at a consistent level (in other words, when you are playing quiet there are no loud notes that jump out unexpectedly, or vice versa).
- Playing quiet but accenting certain notes, like playing Fingerstyle Exercise 3 and picking the 1st string very loud every time, but all the other strings very quietly. This REALLY improves your control!
Conclusion
If you practice these exercises diligently, you will set up an excellent foundation for yourself in fingerstyle technique, and in the future it will be no problem for you to add other techniques such as Alternating Thumb (or Clawhammer as some people call it), Travis Picking, or other more complex forms of fingerstyle.
At Ultimate School of Music, we teach our acoustic guitar students to play lots of interesting fingerstyle guitar music. Contact us for fingerstyle guitar lessons in Dublin.