Subject: RE: Guitar right hand technique
From:
PoppaGator
Date: 17 Dec 04 - 01:18 PM
My technique is probably a bit unusual, because I use fingerpicks exclusively, even for "strumming." I can pick barefingered, and do so often enough when trying to practice quietly, but I'm more comfortable and better able to produce a varety of sounds when wearing the picks (National medium plastic thumbpick, two metal fingerpicks).
My first guitar was a nylon-string classical, and I studied up on my fingerpicking from the beginning, not using picks. After a couple of years, I took classical lessons for a few months, which got me using the right ring finger in addition to the index and middle. (I would later quit using the ring finger.)
When I got my steel-string guitar in 1969, I resolved to learn to play with picks -- both flatpicks and fingerpicks. My fingerpicking tended to be quieter and more painstaking than my boom-chucka flatpick strumming, and I used the two different picking techniques for different songs. With the fingerpicks, I never hit more than a single string at a time and tended to be very careful and quiet.
I was soon playing *long* hours busking on streetcorners, and never developed good enough flatpicking technique to avoid painful cramping in the base of my thumb. So I just quit trying, and decided to wear my fingerpicks at all times. Slowly, I developed a way to play loud, "strumming" with the picks on songs I had formerly flatpicked while playing a bit more quietly on the numbers I had always fingerpicked. Eventually, these two different approaches to using fingerpicks merged into one, and I can fairly easily pick either a single string or a set of multiple strings with any stroke of my thumb or of either finger, all within the course of a given tune/song. (Actually, the thumb can play as many as all 6 strings, but the fingers rarely hit more than 3 or 4.) The thumb handles all the downstrokes, of course, and the fingers upstrokes.
(Playing barehanded, I'll generally strum down with fingernails and up with the thumbnail -- just the opposite. For some reason, this does not confuse me or my hands.)
I might note that I learned *a lot* of entire fingerpicking songs by rote, from tablature, before I could internalize a large enough vocabulary of riffs to even begin playing melody parts semi-freely with the fingers while keeping up a steady bass with the thumb. I had always read about playing that alternating (or monotonic) bass while "improvising" with the fingers, but there's no way I was able to just jump in and start playing that way. I had to learn dozens of John Hurt pieces before I could begin to develop that kind of fluency.
Not using the flatpick does limit my versatility a bit. There's no way I can play, for example, bluegrass-style guitar solos as a fingerpicker (although I can produce a decent BG rhythm-guitar part). Then again, my picking style is not my only limitation, anyway. There are a *lot* of musical styles I enjoy that I can't effectively play on acoustic guitar -- plenty of stuff I can sing but not play, and even more that I can neither sing nor play.
Here's my favorite beginner's fingerpicking pattern, which I learned from a Stephan Grossman book. I *think* I can put this into the same format Pete used above. This is a standard first-position C major chord:
|-0--------0-----------0-|
|----1-----------1-------|
|-------0-----------0----|
|------------------------|
|-3-----------3----------|
|------------------------|
(If I knew how to force the tab to stay in monospaced Courier and not be put into Times Roman, it would look better. But you should get the idea.)
This is good practice because it includes a "pinch" at the start of each measure, along with all the alternations between thumb and fingers. More advanced fingerpicking projects will require various combinations of pinches and single notes, so it's good to get accustomed to both.
Note that the alternating "bass" notes on beats 2 and 4 are on the third (G) string, not truly a bass string. This sets up the possiblity of a slightly more complicated "double-alternating" bass:
|-0--------0-----------0-|
|----1-----------1-------|
|-------0-----------0----|
|-------------2----------|
|-3----------------------|
|------------------------|
All for now!
|
sj
