Folk Fingerstyle Patterns #1of2 (Folk Guitar Lesson FO-101) How to play

Justin's Completely Free Guitar Lessons, Folk Fingerstyle Module Lesson FO-101. Lesson 2.

Guitar Lesson #2 in the Folk Fingerstyle Module for intermediate players introduces the folk fingerstyle patterns we will be developing through the rest of the series. Remember it's real important to find the lesson on the web site so you can see the tab!!

Find the related course notes on the following link
http://justinguitar.com/en/FO-101-FolkFingerstyle1.php

Whole series will be on the web site and a DVD is available with some bonus material! See the web site for more details!

Taught by Justin Sandercoe.

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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

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Have fun :)

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Hi, how are you doing? Justin Sandercoe here.

Welcome to Folk Fingerstyle Basic Patterns 1.

Now, I'm hoping you've seen the previous lesson where I explained what fingers go on what strings,

'cause I'm not going to take us through that again now.

And also, it's very important that you've got the TAB up in front of you.

So, if you've stumbled upon this on YouTube, get over to the website (justinguitar.com),

find this lesson using the lesson index, and make sure that you've got this Pattern 1 in front of you,

because I'm going to be referring to it quite a lot as we start going through the close-ups and stuff,

and it really is lots easier if you can see the Pattern.

So, let's get to a close-up, and get stuck in straight away.

So, this is the first Pattern we're going to learn.

You might have noticed that we're using our thumb on two different strings

and we're just using the 1st and 2nd fingers for this Pattern 1.

Now, the first thing, and the most important thing to start off with when you're doing this sort of fingerstyle,

is getting used to the idea of the thumb moving strings.

So, what I'd recommend you start off with is just playing the thumb on the 5th string, and then the 4th string.

Remember, this is just a regular C chord, in case you missed that bit.

And we should just be playing the 5th string, and the 4th string, with the thumb.

Because sometimes it helps if you rest the 1st and 2nd fingers on their designated strings

and get used to the idea of that thumb moving over between the two strings.

Remember, this is the count.

It's 1...

2...

3...

4...

Because the thumb is always playing on the beat...

2...

3...

4...

Now, have a look at the actual Pattern, the TAB of it, and the notation,

and you'll see that there are four notes with the little "down stems", there,

and they correlate in the TAB to the notes that are on the 3rd fret and the 2nd fret,

so they're the notes on the beat.

Now, what we're going to start off with is adding in some notes now to our Pattern.

The first note we're adding in is the 2nd string,

and hopefully, you'll remember that the 2nd finger looks after the 2nd string,

and if you look at the TAB, you'll see that comes with the same as beat 1,

so if we're just going to add that note now, and we're going to keep our bass,

and we're going to add in that one note on beat 1, so we'd have:

1...

2...

3...

4...

1...

2...

3...

4...

and I'd recommend that you practice that a few times, nice and slowly.

Even slower than this if you need to.

And make sure that you can do that comfortably before we add in any other notes.

Now, the next note we're going to add in is on the G string,

and the G string is played by the 1st finger,

and that note comes in between the 2nd beat and the 3rd beat,

so it would be the 'and' after 2.

If we add that in now with our first note as well, we'd have:

1... 2 'and' 3... 4...

1... 2 'and' 3... 4... It's really important to get that count.

1... 2 'and' 3... 4...

1... 2 'and' 3... 4...

Now, there's just one more note for the Pattern so let's add that in,

and that is the 2nd finger playing the 2nd string,

in the 1st fret, of course, because it's the C chord,

and in the C chord on the 2nd string there's a note, a finger in the 1st fret,

and we're going to add that in after the 3, so that's coming on the 'and' after 3.

So, the Pattern now looks like:

1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

Now, what's really important at this stage is that you do it slowly enough to get it right and in time,

and if that means that you're doing it at like this speed:

1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

that's fine. Do it as slow or as fast as you need to.

Now, I would suspect after a little bit of practice that you should be okay doing it at this kind of speed, maybe:

1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

and you probably don't want to go much faster than that for a little while until your fingers really know what is going on.

Because it needs to get automated. With these Patterns, they have to become instinctive.

You should be able to talk, or watch television, or whatever, while you're doing these Patterns.

But that'll take practice, you just have to do 'em over and over again.

Now, after you feel really comfortable with it, you might like to start speeding it up,

but don't try and speed up too early. Once you've got it, and you're feeling comfortable with it...

you know, here, this sort of thing...

just try speeding it up a little bit.

If you want to, you can put it with a metronome,

but it's also fine just practicing these things without a metronome.

Okay, let's move on to Pattern 2, now, which is very similar.

We still have the thumb moving on the beat:

1... 2... 3... 4...

but you're now going to see that the first note in the melody department is played on beat 2.

You'll see there, if you look at the music again (it's really important to see the music)

that the first note, the 3 (this is the 3rd fret of the 5th string)

is played with the thumb on the 5th string by itself,

and then on beat 2, our thumb has moved over to the 4th string

and we're using our 2nd finger to play the 2nd string.

So, we're starting with thumb...

thumb and 2nd finger together...

Just like before, you want to just add in one note at a time to the Patterns, when you're starting.

1... 2... 3... 4...

1... 2... 3... 4...

Then we might add in the next:

1... 2... 3 'and' 4...

1... 2... 3 'and' 4...

1... 2... 3 'and' 4...

1... 2... 3 'and' 4...

Just again, really slowly, making sure that you get it right, and that it's in time:

1... 2... 3 'and' 4...

It's really important that the thumb is nice and even and that the other notes just fit in.

2... 3 'and' 4...

1... 2... 3 'and' 4...

And again, you practice it slowly until you can do it at a kind of reasonable speed.

Now, what I'd recommend actually, once you can do those two Patterns, before we go any further,

is trying to link the Patterns after each other, because these two are very, very commonly played

one after the other. So, we'd end up having Pattern 1...

Pattern 2...

Pattern 1...

Pattern 2...

Pattern 1... 2...

Pattern 1... 2...

Very, very common to link those two things together, so I'd have a try at that as well.

Okay, we're now onto Pattern number 3, which we're changing to a G chord with the fretting hand, just a regular old G.

Now, what's really important here to realise is that the Patterns are the same,

with the fingers and the order of the movements, but the thumb is now playing the bass note

that needs to move over to the 6th string, so to the note G, and it'll still be jumping over to the 4th string.

So, instead of like on the C chord, it was going 5th string, 4th string, over and over again,

when we change to the G chord, it's going 6th string, 4th string.

So, only a little change, but it's something that I would highly recommend you doing exactly what I'm doing now,

and practicing just moving between the 6th string and the 4th string and kind of get used to that.

Now, I'm hoping that you won't have too much difficulty,

once your thumb's used to doing that, to play the same Patterns, because we've got here

thumb and 2nd finger together:

Thumb 1 Thumb 2 Thumb... together.

Thumb 1 Thumb 2 Thumb...

it's exactly the same as that first Pattern that we looked at with the C chord,

but the bass note, the note that's on beats 1 and 3, has moved over to the 6th string.

All of the rest is the same.

Again, really slowly, make sure that you get it right. When you feel confident, start to speed it up.

Okay, now Pattern 4 is exactly the same as Pattern 2, but now we're on the G chord.

So, this one is, starts off with the bass note by itself, thumb and 2nd finger together,

Bass note, 1st finger, and thumb.

Bass, together, Bass 1 Thumb...

Bass, together, Thumb 1 Thumb...

And, again, we would try and link Patterns 3 and 4, so we'd have this:

Pattern 4...

Pattern 3...

Pattern 4...

Now, once you feel confident with that, what I would recommend

is starting to mix up the patterns a little bit now, so we would go from Pattern 1, which is a C chord:

to Pattern 3, which is the same thing, but with a G chord:

and try to get the change without having a pause in there.

So, you go 1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

1... 2 'and' 3 'and' 4...

And, of course, maybe you might play 1 and 2 on the C chord, and then 3 and 4 on the G chord.

Don't be surprised if it takes quite a lot of practice to get these Patterns automated.

Don't expect to just be able to learn what they are and do it, and change between the different

chords and the different Patterns right away. It doesn't work like that.

It didn't work like that way for me, and I've seen hundreds of students over the years really struggle

with this stuff. You have to just do it slowly and accurately. Take one Pattern, practice it

over and over again until you're confident with it, then learn another one.

And I know I'm going through a few Patterns in this one video, but I don't want to have

to spend ages and ages just on one Pattern and end up having loads and loads of very long

and probably quite boring videos. So, it's up to you now to stop and do the practice,

get that Pattern sorted out properly and be able to do it. Now, there's one

really important thing that I need to explain to you, which is the idea of the different chords,

because so far we've just looked at a C chord and a G chord, but really, what it's about

is whether a chord has a 5th-string root, or a 6th-string root.

So, the common chords with a 5th-string root, we'd have C of course...

maybe B7...

A minor...

that's kind of the main chords. G with a B base, if you want to get all fancy...

you could use that as well. With a 6th-string root, you've G chord...

E minor...

F, I guess, if you're using your barre chords, or any of your, you know, E-shape barre chords.

You've also got, now, a little bit of a, kind of a "funny business" going on here, which is

the D chord. What do you do with a D chord? Hang on, that's got a 4th-string root, and it kind of muddles

all of our Patterns up. Now, the trick with the D chord, is, well there's a couple

of different ways of dealing with D. Most commonly done, when you've got a D chord,

is you move all of your fingers down a string, so the thumb would then take care

of the 4th string and the 3rd string, and your 1st finger will end up playing

the 2nd string, and your 3rd* finger will take the thinnest string, and your 3rd finger just doesn't

get any action at all. So, that's the most common way for a D chord, so you just

move all of your fingers down a string and play the same Pattern like we played with the C chord

but just everything toward the ground one string.

The other approach, which is quite an interesting one, I think it sounds pretty cool, is to play

a D with an F# base, something we looked at in the Intermediate course, and treat it as

a 6th-string root. That's a very, very common way around it. There's some other tricks

as well, but we'll probably get onto those later. So, for now, just be aware of the different

chords: you should know, hopefully, all of your open chords, where the root note is.

If you don't, then that's something you really need to check out. So, if you're playing the C chord,

"What string is the note C on?", right, on the thickest couple of strings.

It's really important that you understand that, you know? That's kind of basic guitar skills.

So, make sure that you know the Patterns that fit with each of the different chords.

Don't just practice C and G.

A nice progression might be to practice C, G, A minor, F.

Very, very common chord sequence.

Which would obviously be 5th-string root, 6th-string root, 5th-string root, 6th-string root.

Okay, there's ten billion songs that use that one, right? So, just with this really simple little bit of info,

these couple of Patterns that we've looked at so far, there's a lot of mileage in it.

So, don't feel like you've got to rush too much. Don't, you know, I can't stress that enough. When you try

and rush through these things, you won't get them. You'll end up kind of not playing the Pattern

exactly right, or playing the wrong strings half the time, and it's really, it's better to have

these kind of, because we're going to get more complicated, right, but you want to get these

basic Patterns down. Really, I call it a "default setting", you know, the fingers automatically

go to those strings, and you've got these fingerstyle Patterns that you can just pull out straight

away, and they happen naturally, and it only happens through lots and lots

and lots and lots

of practice.

So, when you feel confident with these ones and you can do them properly and easily, and they feel natural,

then join me for the next lesson, when we're going to break out

the 3rd finger, and make the Patterns just a little bit more complicated.

See you for that lesson very soon, take care of yourselves, bye bye.