This lesson will help you develop your upstoke picking techique and show you the best way to get a better sound, increase your pick speed and improve your timing.
Fingerstyle (or finger picking) Guitar Lessons
Finger picking, or fingerstyle guitar, is the technique of playing the guitar by plucking the strings directly with the fingertips, fingernails, or picks attached to fingers. This page features dozens of lessons covering the various techniques, such as Travis Picking and fingerstyle, not to mention several songs arranged specifically for picking.
Dec20
How To Improve Your Upstroke Picking
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May01
Cat’s In The Cradle – Harry Chapin
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There’s a little bit of everything in this lesson, from easy arpeggios and strumming to some basic Travis style finger picking patterns. As always, David picks the song apart into small pieces that even many beginners can get with some concerted practice. Have fun learning this Harry Chapin classic!
Apr01
An Interview with Andrew DuBrock
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Andrew DuBrock, one of the best when it comes to guitar tutorial books, discusses the challenges and rewards of learning fingerstyle guitar playing.
Mar13
Scarborough Fair
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Learn how to play the sparse and spooky (but very easy to learn) version of Scarborough Fair that Nick and David came up with while working on The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar.
Mar13
House of the Rising Sun
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We’re going to learn different fingerpicking patterns for House of the Rising Sun, a folk song covered by the Animals, Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton and others.
Mar13
Scarborough Fair
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Most of this song involves simple patterns that are repeated during each verse. There is some very interesting and intricate fingerstyle guitar playing.
Sep01
Turning Practice Into Play #2 – “Quick Change Chromatic Blues”
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Here’s a very cool single-guitar finger style instrumental blues piece that will teach you about driving, single note bass lines and creating cool melody lines and fills.
Jun15
Turning Practice into Play #1 – “Drop D Happy Blues”
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Guitar Noise presents the first in a new series of songs written specifically for guitar studies. Here is a cool blues number, reminiscent of Taj Mahal’s “Fishing Blues” to help you develop your finger picking, hammer-on skills and use of syncopation and timing.
Apr30
In Part 2 of “The Learning Curve of Various Styles of Guitar,” Jamie Andreas looks at the skills needed to become a “strum and sing” guitar player.
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