How to Start Fingerpicking (in 4 Moves!)

If you have poor right-hand (pluck hand) fingerstyle playing posture, you won't be able to accurately play fingerstyle guitar, (and you'd likely welcome an easy way to fix it). There's nothing worse than feeling like you can't properly hit notes as a guitarist, and this video will help you fix that!...

In this video, I�m going to show you a "4 step plan" that can repair the most common fingerstyle playing posture flaws to give you a nice, accurate, smooth feeling pluck-hand playing posture sooner than you think.

I�m going to show you how to hit correct notes all the time, develop the best flow to your music, and fix up your sense of timing as well.

When you apply the easy drills shown here, you will start to feel better about your fingerstyle guitar playing almost instantly. Plus, these drills will work towards permanently fixing your bad fingerstyle playing habits once and for all.

WATCH THE VIDEO:

We�re talking all about fingerpicking in this post. And, if you�ve had trouble trying to develop fingerpicking � if you�ve maybe found it too difficult maybe too complicated, then you are going to LOVE this lesson.

For a lot of guitar players out there, (who�ve tried and possibly given up at learning fingerpicking), the reason for your bad results (most commonly) tends to be your plucking hand�s posture.

If you don�t have that pluck-hand posture correctly set up, then you�re going to experience a lot of trouble reaching some good high level fingerpicking performance.

And, that bad posture� it won�t just hold you back, it might even cause you to give up learning how to fingerpick all together.

1). PLUCK-HAND POSTURE:
The first thing we want to do is work on establishing the best possible hand posture. To really get this to work, we need to look at some of the world�s finger-style masters, (which are generally the classical guitarists).

We need to examine how a master player like the legendary Andr�s Segovia plucks, or how the very distinguished Christopher Parkening has his hand when fingerplucking, or how the world-renowned Spanish guitarist Paco de Lucia had his fingerpicking hand posture.

Andr�s Segovia:

If we were to examine the best of the best we'd start to notice that they all share a common trait in how their plucking hand posture is established.

And, in order to learn how to get your own fingerplucking hand results up to a really high level� your first move is to start duplicating the hand posture of the greats, because in doing that, you�ll also (over time) start to DUPLICATE their results�

Posture Explained:

2). DEVELOPING ACCURACY
Once you begin to develop your hand posture you�re well on your way to bigger and better things. So, the next move you need to make is to get acquainted with an accuracy exercise.

The exercise that I�m about to show you is easy enough to start doing right away, so you can add it into your daily studies and it�ll immediately help you with getting a more automatic sense for where the strings you need to pluck are located.

Plus, it will also help with developing a well executed feel for your hand position, (and doing this will lead you to the next level of fingerpicking skill).

Accuracy study:

3). DEVELOPING FLOW
The next move for developing your fingerpicking ability is your flow, (also often referred to as your feel, or groove).

This area of fingerpicking is all about doing some heavy investing into gaining that capacity notice and to also control the feel of the phrasing while maintaining the feel for the beat in time.

Plus, it also involves becoming more tuned in to what happens technically as you�re working to master a part that you�re learning.

To help you begin gauging some higher level dexterity for this, we�re going to slightly modify the exercise that we just performed back in the accuracy section.

Flow Development Exercise:

4). DEVELOPING FLUIDITY
The last move that I�d like you to work toward developing is the skill of becoming very fluid with what you�re performing.

This is something that can only be taken care of with a metronome, (or some other time keeping device, like a sequencer, or a drum machine), and (of course) a lot of repetitive practice.

The trick to nailing this part of your guitar playing is getting into the habit of setting aside a daily practice routine.

Within your routine, you need to establish a series of exercises (and eventually musical pieces), that will help you to gain a higher level of fluid movement when you�re performing anything that you have set aside as a fingerstyle accomplishment for your playing.

So, let me help get things started in this department with a short, repetitive scale exercise.

Developing Fluidity: