Basic Fingerstyle Exercise (Guitar Lesson BC-184) Guitar for beginners Stage 8

Justin's Completely Free, Beginners Guitar Course Lesson BC-184.
This is Stage 8, Lesson 4.

This video introduces you to a very easy exercise to start learning to play fingerstyle guitar.

Find the related course notes on the following link:
http://justinguitar.com/en/BC-184-FingerstyleExercise.php

The Justinguitar Beginners Guitar Course, a series of over 100 lessons on guitar for beginners. Text support is on the web site and also in a proper old skool paper book which can be ordered from the web site of your local music store :)

Taught by Justin Sandercoe.

Full support at the justinguitar web site where you will find hundreds of lessons on a wide range of subjects, and all the scales and chords that you will ever need! There is a great forum too to get help, no matter what the problem.

And it is all totally free, no bull. No sample lessons, no memberships, no free ebook. Just tons of great lessons :)

To get help with this lesson (and for further info and tabs), find the Lesson ID in the video title (like ST-667 or whatever) and then look it up on the Lesson Index page of justinguitar.com

http://www.justinguitar.com

Have fun :)

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Hey, how're you doing? Justin here.
In this video today we're

going to be checking out some really basic
fingerstyle exercises

for you guys that have never played any fingerstyle before,

I wanna try and get your fingers moving

If you are wondering about this funny sheet down here

it is just to reflect a little bit of light back on my fingers

so when we do a close up you can see clearly
what I'm doing.

Before you think

“what is he doing dragging weird sheets into the screen?”

That is why it is there.

So let's have a look at that close up now.

What I want you to do is I want you to position your fingers

on the strings so you have got your 3rd finger picking

the thinnest string, your 2nd finger plucking the 2nd string,

your 1st finger plucking the 3rd string

and your thumb plucking the thickest string.

On your left hand you are holding down a G chord.

A regular old 1st generation G chord if you like.

So what we are going to do first is this little exercise.

We are going to pick now thumb . . . 1, 2, 3 . . . and again:

thumb . . . 1, 2, 3 . . .

you will probably have to look at it

a little bit at this stage.

Trying to “suss” (work) out where those notes are.

Just try and do it nice and evenly if you can.

Now it is really important that you realise

that you don't have to have long fingernails to do this.

There are lots of great guitar players that play with

no fingernails.

I think Neil Young doesn't play with fingernails.

Dominic Miller, the fantastic guitar player that plays

in Sting's band, chopped off all of his fingernails

and just plays with the flesh on his fingers and he is a

fantastic fingerstyle guitar player.

So don't feel like you have to have nails.

Now I do wear fake nails and I know it looks really gay

or whatever girly or whatever you think.

I don't really care because it makes a really good sound

on the guitar and if I didn't have plastic fingernails on

then my fingernails wouldn't last long

enough to actually do any playing at all.

So I am not recommending that you go and get fake nails

unless you are really into fingerstyle and you play a lot.

Right?

But if you want to grow a little bit of your natural

fingernail to pluck the string

it does tend to have a slightly nicer, brighter sound

to my ear than just playing

with the fleshy parts of your fingers.

But it doesn't really matter.

Just thought I would point that out before

we get all these haters on the videos going

“oh my God, you look like a vampire.

Your fingernails look really weird”.

Yeah I know they look really weird.

I can't help it. If I could change it so they

look more normal I would.

But anyway, back to our exercises.

So exercise 1 that we are doing is with our G chord going

thumb . . . 1, 2, 3 . . . thumb, 1, 2, 3 . . .

Over and over again . . . nice and simple . . .

When you get bored of doing that

I want you to change it and now go thumb . . . 3, 2, 1

. . . thumb, 3, 2, 1 . . . And do that for a little bit . . .

When you get bored of that
the next one that I want you to do

is thumb . . . 1, 2, 3, 2, 1

. . . thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1 . . .

Just keep going through that trying to get your picking nice

and even . . . Trying to keep it in time . . . and

trying to be accurate about the strings that you pick . . .

Now hopefully you will remember from

when we were doing the rhythm guitar
where we hit the bass

note of the chord and then we did a couple of strums

that most of the chords have their

bass note on a different string.

So for both E and G the bass note is on the 6th string.

So we were just playing a G chord but the finger picking

would have been exactly the same for an E or an Emin.

But if we went to say a C chord our thumb would move over

onto the 5th string.

So let's just have a close look at that now.

The thumb is on the 5th string here.

We are playing a C chord with the left hand

and we are doing . . . thumb, 1, 2, 3 . . .

We go through the same exercises again . . .

And then reversing the top ones.

So 3, 2, 1 . . . thumb, 3, 2, 1 . . .

After you have done that for a little while we go up and back

. . . thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1, thumb . . .

And then even over onto a D chord.

So if we play D the thumb moves all the way

onto the 4th string. So . . . thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1 . . .

And then maybe back to G . . .

Thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1 . . . D . . .

You can see that the string change from the thumb is just

following the names of the chords.

If we went to C . . . D . . . G . . . D . . . and back.

It is a really, really good technique

and can be really simple.

You can see already we have started to make music

out of it just using this . . .

Thumb, 1, 2, 3, 2, 1 . . . pattern and doing that pattern

once on whatever chord we felt like. If you keep it consistent

suddenly it sounds like a song.

Fingerstyle is a very cool thing.

When you first start it most people find it a little bit

awkward and they are picking the wrong strings

or they miss it or they start picking the wrong group of

strings that kind of thing. It's dead normal.

As usual pretty much everything on the guitar it just takes some

practice. So have a good go at doing that and we are going to

do a few more fancier exercises with the old fingerstyle next

time but just as a really good exercise start working that in.

Getting used to the bass moving around
onto different strings.

That would be a really really cool start for you.

So, have fun with that and I will see you

for another lesson shortly. Bye, bye.