Fingerstyle Beginner Lesson

How to Play Fingerstyle Guitar

Fingerstyle guitar (sometimes fingerpicking) is a technique where the fingers of the picking hand play the strings. No pick is used. The picking-hand thumb, index, middle and ring fingers are used, and sometimes the pinky finger. Traditionally, these fingers are lettered: p, i, m, a. The thumb is p, the index finger is i, the middle finger is m, the ring finger is a. These abbreviations come from the Spanish language. (pulgar, indice, medio, anular).

Fingerstyle is a general term for using the hand to play guitar notes, and refers to styles ranging from classical to latin to country.

The goal of the fingerstyle guitarist is to play several independent musical parts at once. The bass-line, chords and melody of a song can be played altogether, with some adjustments.

The best way to begin playing guitar in this style is simply to play individual chords with the fingers. The notes of the chords can be arpeggiated—played one at a time by each finger. The fingers can also play the notes all together.

Fingerstyle Example

Let’s start our study with a G^maj chord. Since our example will be in the key of “G”, all tones of this chord will work—even the high “E” string, played open, which is in the key of G major but not normally in the G chord. Fingerpicking changes the ‘rules’ a little bit. This chord may not sound good if directly strummed because then its tones all “attack” together. But if it’s played with the fingers, they each begin separately and ring out; this can disguise chords that are dissonant and make them sound beautiful.

How do we approach this? Since most of us have less than six fingers on our picking hand, we’ll need to choose some tones from the chord to pick. Let’s try a few sequences.

Fingerstyle Sequence 1

All four fingers moving together

In sequence #1, all four fingers work as a team, playing each note in sequence. The thumb starts on the lowest string, and the index finger starts on the next string, and so on. When it’s time to move to the new string, all four fingers take a step down to the next set of four strings.

Fingerstyle Sequence 2

Thumb stays, three fingers move

In sequence #2, the thumb continues to play the bass note of the chord, G. the next three fingers work as a team like they did before, playing each note in sequence, then moving to the next set of strings and repeating. The thumb stays behind.

This technique is significant because normally the thumb will play the bass note of the chord, typically its root note. The other fingers are generally more free to play any note from the chord.

Fingerstyle Sequence 3

Four fingers move forwards, then backwards

In sequence #3, the four fingers play in sequence as before, but now they also reverse direction, so that the ring finger is first and the thumb is the last.

Once you’ve developed these fundamental motions in the picking hand, the notes of the chord can begin to change as well.

Fingerstyle Sequence 4

The chords used

In this last sequence, we’ll play the same three strings over and over again with the index, middle and ring fingers: the fourth string, the third string and the second string. (tones D, G and D). Now, we’ll move the bass of the chord around and create a more active, flowing chordal harmony.

The notation and tab

This example shows how even a very simple pattern can be musically interesting.

There are infinite possibilities for the fingerstyle chords. The bass part can move, the highest note or melody can move, and so can inner voices – the notes played on the strings that are neither highest nor lowest. Experiment with this technique of playing chords fingerstyle and moving voices around, and in time you’ll discover the possibilities for yourself.

Key Exercises

1. Practice all four sequences until you’ve mastered them.
2. Apply the sequences to another chord progression to any song.