Hi everybody, this is Lisa McCormick. Welcome to the Guitar Tricks Channel. I’m your guest host today and we’re going to start with a tip of the week. And this is especially for people who are interested in finger style guitar playing. And it’s especially important. And that is the finger nails on this hand on your fretting hand have to be really short, not like painfully bleeding short. But they have to be really short. Because if anything getting in the way of you getting really good contact here and good tone, it’s going to show up in your finger picking because the finger picking brings out each note one at a time. So it’s going to sound more like that than like that. So, tip of the week, keep these nails short. These nails you can do whatever you want.
We’re here today to do a finger picking lesson. We’ve had a lot of request from the Facebook friends and folks on the forum at Guitar Tricks for little more finger picking on the channel. So, what I’m going to do today is show you a little short little finger picking pattern but then some fun to do with it. Because another thing that people are asking me is for noodling ideas. So I’m going to show you a simple 4-beat finger picking pattern. We’ll make a little piece out of it.
First of all, what I’m going to do, I’m going to start on the G chord and what I’m going to do is I’m going to play the base note of the G chord with my thumb, the highest string with my middle finger, third string with my thumb, and second string with my index finger. That’s it.
The only thing that will change as I change from one chord to the next is that very first step. What note do I play is the base note for whatever chord I’m playing. So when I switch to a C chord, my base note is now on the fifth string. And when I switch to a D chord, my base note is now on the fourth string.
Let me take you to a chord progression that is going to go two measures of G, a measure of C, and a measure of D. With that pattern, here we go. And repeat it. okay, so that’s kind of pretty and kind of fun and kind of interesting but the noodling possibilities are not quite happening yet. So now we’re going to spice it up a little bit. I’m going to have you make a G chord this way with your pinky on the high note of the G chord which is the third fret of the first string. Many people prefer to do G this way or this way. Either one is correct. But for this thing, you want your pinky right there because when we go over to the C chord, you’re going to leave your pinky there. And it gives the C a nice kind of high sparkle. Okay. So we’ve got our G, we’ve got our C with this extra note in it. And now for the D, we’re going to do something real tricky. Take this whole configuration here. Don’t let anything stray. Move the whole thing up two frets. So your base note is now on the D which is the fifth fret of the fifth string. And that is a variation of the D chord. So we’ve taken the C and we’ve brought it up to there.
So now let’s hear what the progression sounds like when we put it together starting with the G. so that’s getting a little bit more fun. And let me show just one more position to toss in here so you can have more fun with it. And that is we’re going to take this whole thing for another trip up the neck all the way to the tenth fret. That is my base note. Same shape as we have down here. But now the base note is on a G. and so this is a higher version, a variation on a G chord. If I play regular G chord, you can hear how they’re kind of in the same ball part. So let’s our progression up there. We’ve got two measures of G. Let’s start way up here. G, C, and D. let’s see how that sounds. We’ll take it home to a normal G.
Alright, so this is Lisa McCormick in the Guitar Tricks channel. Come on over to guitartricks.com if you want to see a lot more of the stuff. See you.
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