Learn to Play Stealin from Fred Sokolow

Learn to Play Stealin from Fred Sokolow Hello, I am Fred Sokolow and this is the beginner’s finger picking guitar video. Finger picking is a style on music that is really important to the blues, to country music, folk music, rock and roll, pop music. It’s really crept into all different kinds of American music. So what we are going to do is look at a whole bunch of different finger picking patterns and accompaniments and rhythm grooves. So the first thing you will need to do of course is tune up. Let’s start at the very beginning. You need to get a low E note for your 6th string. I am starting at the very beginning here with the first. We’re tuning up in the first chords and all of that. So here’s your E. You can get this one tuning fourth maybe a pitch pipe. There are all kinds of electronic tuners or for piano and other guitar, whatever. Tune this to me and once you’ve got your low E, then you can tune all the other strings just to your own guitar. For instance the fifth string is an A note so you want to fret the sixth string that’s already into fret on the fifth fret and that gives you the A. You can match the fifth string up to that note. I want you to notice that when I fret the string, I’m going to fret any string. I am going arch my fingers over the string so that I am not touching any of the other strings. It’s just the one that I am fretting. Otherwise you kind of mute out the other strings. You just want to touch the one that you are fretting and you want to fret it near the fret wire not touching it because you are going to get a strange noise just like that. So near the fret wire but not touching it and you match those two up then you move down a fret to fifth string on the fifth fret again and because you were on D note you can tune your fourth string to that note. Now you’ve got the D fret on the fifth fret and you can match your 3rd string into that. That’s a G note. Now you can move down to the fourth fret for a change. You are going to fret the third string there and match the second string to that. That’s a B. Back up to the fifth fret, you fret the second string to the fifth fret and tune the first string to that high E note so you got a high and a low E. You’ve got E, A, D, G, B and E. That’s the standard guitar tune and there are lots of other tunings but that’s the most popular one. You are going to need lots of chords to play, just about any tune on the guitar but you can get a lot of mileage out of just three chords. Let’s start with three fairly simple ones. To play in the key of C, you need this and you start with the C chord. We’ve learned a lesson about arching the fingers over the fret chords so you know this kind of a sound. You’ve got a clear sound when you do that and you want to make it sound like that. That’s your C. Every once in a while you’ll add your pinky to the 3rd string here but tune C into a C7th so you’ve got a C and C7. Now if you just move and kind of spread your fingers apart so this one goes down and these two go up. I’ve got a G7th. You might want to practice going back and forth between C and G7th going back like this. I’m just strumming on these with my thumb and nothing fancy is going on yet with the right hand. If you want to you can take your pinky and pitch down here and turn your G7 into a G chord. But basically here you just got C and G7th. One more chord you need and then we are going to play a blues tune. This is an F chord. Here you moved these two down and you flatten your index finger so that is fretting the first and the second strings both at the same time. This chord is on the top four strings so when you play it, you just strum those top four. You don’t strum these two bottom ones. So now you’ve got to practice going back and forth between F and C and remember that your index finger is pretty much staying in the same place. It’s helpful when you are switching back and forth between one chord to another to realize that which fingers stay anchored there. It just makes a little less work to do those switching. Now once you have practice the switching back and forth between the C and the G7th and the F, you are ready to do a little right hand finger picking pattern. This is what’s called an alternating thumb finger picking pattern and it’s a real basic pattern that gets used on all kinds of music. We are going to start out with a real slow because it is new. You can be playing with the thumb and one finger. By the way, it’s called finger picking and some people right away want to know do I have to wear finger picks and the answer is no. You can do it just for this. It’s really nice to get used to playing the guitar just with your bare fingers. Eventually, you can wear finger pick. The main reason to wear them is to get louder and also if you play a whole bunch, you know your fingers can get kind of sore. So when you are starting out I think it’s simpler you just use your fingers. For this pattern, you are just using your thumb and your index finger. You are going on a C chord you are going 5-2-3-1 over and over again. So it’s thumb-index, thumb-index over and over again like that, 5-2-3-1 and then you play the F chord. It is the same thing but only you are starting on the fourth string going from your thumb going 4-2-4-1 like that. You know there’s that kind of an old swing, old rhythm to that. On the G7th you are playing 6-2-3-1 so it is just your bottom string that is changing. That’s been the same basic things going thumb-index, thumb-index so we’ve got a three-chord tune. There’s an old blues tune called Stealin’. I want you to play it along with me and follow my left hand to see where the changes go. See how the chords are changing. We’ll do it once to just to get you a little bit into the song and then I’ll split the screen off so that you can watch both my hands real closely. This goes [Demonstration] Let’s split the screen up now and do that in a way that you can watch both hands at once. [Demonstration]