Fingerpicking Basics

The terms finger picking or fingerstyle guitar refer to using the fingers of your right hand to pluck the strings individually, rather than using a pick or fingers to strum the strings. The technique is very similar and can be identical to the way a classical guitarist plays.

The number of fingers players use varies. Some of the early blues guitarists like Reverend Gary Davis used just the thumb and index finger, resting the other 3 fingers on the pick guard. Merle Travis, for whom this style is sometimes called Travis Picking, also played with this 1-finger technique. Many of the folk and ragtime guitarists of the 1960s learned a similar style using 2 fingers, but still anchoring the remaining fingers on the guitar.

I prefer to teach students the classical approach of using the thumb and 3 fingers, keeping the little finger off the guitar, not anchored. The reason for not anchoring the little finger is to give more freedom of movement to the hand and fingers, especially the ring finger.

In music notation we use letters to identify the right hand fingers: p for the thumb, i for the index, m for the middle, and a for the ring finger. These letters are from the Spanish terms for the digits, pulgar, indice, medio, and anular.

In what I call home position for the right hand, the thumb plays the 3 bass strings (6th, 5th & 4th) and each finger is responsible for only 1 string. The index plays the 3rd string, the middle plays the 2nd string, and the ring plays the 1st string.

The first picking pattern to practice is an arpeggio, which means holding down a chord and plucking the strings individually, or one at a time in some repetitive order. A good song to start with for this is House Of The Rising Sun.

The next pattern to learn is what we call an alternating bass pattern. In these patterns your thumb works independently of the fingers, striking two bass strings alternately, at the speed of quarter notes. The two bass strings will change depending on the chord you are playing. While the thumb plays on the beats, a finger can play either on a beat with the thumb or by itself, between two beats. We call it a pinch when a finger plays with the thumb, as the thumb and finger are moving toward each other. A good song to look at for this technique is Dust In The Wind.

There are many other branches of the finger picking tree so check out some of the songs and videos around the web site.