Fingering Techniques in Blues Fingerpicking

Video Transcript

Okay, so one of the first things I said was it's really personal preference whether you use two fingers or three fingers. So, you know, I don't want to confuse you by saying that you need to do it one way or the other. You should really do what's comfortable to you and what you're able to wrap your head around. But, if we kind of go back to this idea of separating what the thumb is doing from what the rest of the fingers are doing. One thing to, you know, kind of maybe, the first step you can think about now that you're going to add other notes in with what the thumb is doing, is to just maybe, you know, start plucking some of the upper strings, maybe on the second and forth beats of that pattern. Right? So, on my left hand, I'm just fingering a C chord and so I'm going get the, my right thumb is going to be kind of doing the, doing kind of a first and third here. And what you can do with just some of the fingers are on the second and fourth beats, right now, I'm doing it with my middle finger and my ring finger. But, that's just because I like to do it that way. You could also do it just with one finger. Now, I'm just doing it with my middle finger. Same pattern, it's just a matter of comfort and personal taste. You know, I can also do it with my ring finger alone. I just think it gives you a lot more freedom to mix it up and do kind of more interesting things if you just practice using as many fingers as you can. So, here I am using both my middle finger and my ring finger. So you can see that my thumb isn't changing what it's doing. It's just doing that one, two, one, two pattern. And I've just sort of added on the second and fourth kind of beats. If, you know, think of it as a four beat measure. I've just added kind of, you know, plucking. You know, in this case, I've done the B and the E string and I'm just alternating between those. But you could do it a different way. Like I could go, again, one, two, one, two, with the thumb. And you could just go, just stay on the on one of the upper strings, the high E or just do the, maybe one of the other ones. Right? Or, alternate between if you want. You could even add a, you know, maybe even the G string if you want, which is this one. So you could even go. See, there I've used my index finger on that one. But, remember, you don't have to do your, you know, you don't have to dedicate those fingers to the strings in that way. You can do it kind of however you want. So that same pattern, I could just do with two fingers if I wanted to.

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