Guitarnet Free Guitar Lesson: Fingerstyle Playing

This lesson is a brief introduction to fingerstyle playing. We're assuming that you've got a few chords under your belt, and want to do something with them other than strumming them.

This lesson introduces four basic fingerstyle right hand* patterns, each with the same chord shapes in the left (fretting) hand. Once you can play these patterns with the chord shapes in the examples, use the same patterns with other chords to create your own pieces. These patterns are used in thousands of famous songs, and provide an instant accompaniment when you don’t just want to strum the chords with a plectum. They can also be used to create your own solo fingerstyle pieces.

* We’re assuming you’re a right-handed player, i.e. you fret with your left hand and pluck / pick with your right.

Right Hand (Picking Hand) Guitar Fingering

In guitar music notation, the fingers of the picking hand are referred to as p i m and a, as shown in the diagram below. Most of the time, the notation does not show this, but when the composer or editor thinks that it is important or beneficial to specify which fingers to use they'll be included.

Fingerstyle pattern 1

In all of these exercises, start slowly and build up speed once you can play the notes clearly and evenly. The picking hand fingering that is shown in the first bar should be repeated throughout the example.

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