Fingerstyle Guitar Playing

Fingerstyle guitar playing can allow a guitarist to play all sorts of parts that would be difficult or even impossible to play with a pick. The ability to pluck non-adjacent strings at the same time without touching the strings in between them, is sometimes a huge advantage to this style of guitar (though pick players well versed in hybrid picking can also do this). There are actually a whole variety of different fingerstyle methods, each of which sounds quite different from the others. Even for a player that mostly plays with a pick, having a fingerstyle technique to fall back on can really increase the options they have in their playing, particularly with slower, more subdued songs.

This lesson is going to be using a very simple variation of the classical guitar fingerstyle. Sometimes this gets confused with Travis picking, but there are differences between the two. The classical style is very simple to understand, but still quite powerful to actually use. For the sake of the following exercises the 1st string is plucked by the ring finger, the 2nd string is plucked by the middle finger, and the 3rd string is plucked by the index finger. All three of the bass strings are played using the thumb. If you get deeper into fingerstyle, you will encounter situations where the plucking fingering does change, but that requires a good amount of experience in the basics first.

The following example is just to walk you through a very simple use of this technique. Even though you never actually strum the entire chord, you should be switching between holding the entire chord each time. The notes in gray are not plucked, they are just a reminder that you should be changing to the full chord, not just fretting the ones you are playing at a given time. You don’t need to worry about muting, you should let the notes ring together to form the chord.

You may have noticed that the A and D chords have an open note added to them that you normally do not include in the open chords. These are the fifth notes of the root, except going down in pitch. Normally, for strummed chords, it doesn’t sound very good to include those notes, but when you are playing fingerstyle guitar, it can add a bit of interest by including those notes. Quite often, a solo fingerstyle guitarist uses the bass strings to function in the same capacity that a bass would serve in a band, to lay down a rhythm line. It can sometimes even sound as though the guitarist is playing two distinct instruments at the same time.

Another thing that can be done to make a line more interesting is to play around with sustained versions of the chord by incorporating those notes into the fingerstyle line. Without changing the fingerstyle pattern, it allows the guitarist to add a little tension and interest to even very simple lines. The example below uses the same finger pattern as the above example, but plays around with the sustained notes with the D minor chord.

While just a very simple example, you can audibly hear the effect of just changing that one note in the chord. A guitarist can build some fairly complex lines with techniques like this, without actually having to change chords. In some instances, an entire melody in a fingerstyle guitar line will be created using nothing much more complex than changing the note on one or two strings. If you actually tried strumming half note chord changes, you would not get anywhere near the same effect, even though you are technically using that overall tonality. Letting the chords ring together from individual notes does allow a guitarist to include some notes that might have sounded just a little too dissonant to include in a fully strummed version of the chord, which can allow for some really interesting guitar fingerstyle lines.

The above examples are a very good way to start getting used to using fingerstyle playing. Having a good grasp of using your fingers in this way precisely is very important if you want to move on to more advanced fingerstyle guitars. However, even if you don’t, just being able to play these simple types of patterns can be a decent addition to your bag of tricks. There really are songs out there that really aren’t much more complex than the above example. “Love Hurts” by Nazareth and “House of the Rising Sun” both are played with very similar patterns as the ones shown above.

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