Fingerstyle Basics: Simple Exercises For Long Term Improvement

► Accompanying worksheet available on my Patreon:   / 35218327   Hey everyone! Today, I figured I'd show you something that always comes up, every time one of my students asks me about fingerstyle. They'll show me the song they're working on (Dust In The Wind, Blackbird, something like that) and they'll talk about the pattern, about how they memorized it, got everything in the right order. And then when I ask them to play it... even though everything is "correct" it doesn't sound right. Why is that? I want to demonstrate something very important to you today. I want to show you that it's not about memorizing finger picking patterns. There are a few key things that if you are able to do, you'll be able to play any fingerstyle tune. TABLE OF CONTENTS 0:29 - "STANDARD" POSITION 1:04 - FINGERPICKING WARMUP 3:24 - ADDING CHORD SWITCHES 4:57 - MOST USEFUL/COMMON PATTERN The first thing is having your fingers fall into position. That's very simple, you just learn where to put your fingers and get used to having them in those spots. To get comfortable with fingerpicking, start with the most basic component of a finger picking pattern: ascending and descending. We need to be comfortable and be able to ascend and descend smoothly, hopefully with a metronome. Once we have those two components. We have to figure out how to integrate chord switching. I don't want to have to do this step later when my pattern is twice as hard. Let's do it right now with these basic motions! Finally, once we've worked on positioning, comfort, the basic motions, switching chords while doing those basic patterns, then we're finally ready to learn the most common finger picking pattern ever, which requires our thumb to change strings. This requires us to learn the roots of each chord, and it's a pretty big topic for something so simple, but if you approach it this way, you'll have a better idea of what to do in any fingerpicking situation because there are certain patterns that just must be followed. You'll know where to put your fingers on the strings. You know, and from there, it's just a matter of working things out slowly. ► If you want some extra help, I also have my finger picking course that covers everything from the most basic motions to the most useful patterns on guitar: https://goodguitarist.com/fingerpicki... Practice hard and I'll see you soon! -James --- http://goodguitarist.com/fingerpickin...   / goodguitarist     / goodguitarist   #fingerstyle #fingerpicking #guitartutorial