hey hey hey hey hey guys I haven't done anything for a while I'm in a bit of a mess here but I thought I would pop on and do a video a bit of a live see how this works out see if the video stutters if it does because that's what's been putting me off live streaming if it does I'll try this bad buy the BT mini hope not advertising it but there you go I thought I'd put this up here and because and what I wanted to do is want to show you one of the easiest finger picking patterns that sounds awesome it sounds awesome yeah and it sounds really really complex what it is that you do it and it adds some dimension to your cards now generally what happened when when I started finger picking I did the whole sort of House of the Rising Sun thing which was which involves using all fingers we're not going to use all the fingers today we're going to use a really soft bare-bones approach in fact actually if you stick around to the end of this video what I will do is I will I will do an extra sort of finger picking strumming pattern that is super useful and yeah that's really really cool to add to your arsenal of tricks as well right so what we have what we what we've got really essentially with this finger picking pattern is we've got a city super simple idea and this works over any of you cards as I said before with the House of the Rising Sun thing what we end up doing is we end up using all the fingers now if i zoom in here and just show you my fingers the set up are of your fingers is super important to successfully doing finger style stuff and it's all down to this thumb and I'll show you how this works if I get my thumb I'm gonna dig I'm gonna dig the string in and show you where I contact the string with the thumb so I'm gonna do that though all right and I've created a groove there so you can see that groove on my thumb that groove there is how I'm making the contact win that string there so that's what happens there that's that string is Chuck with the side of the thumb as opposed to I'll just dig in there that part of the thumb we don't want that part of the thumb because what that does is it encourages this curling action with the thumb and that means that that what happens is the thumb ends up coming inside the fingers because what we're finger picking what we want is we want all these fingers to essentially have like their own swimlanes yeah so if you imagine it's swimming each finger has its own swim learn that it doesn't go out of so that's what we're have to do in there so that's thumb goes on there and notice how far forward it is it's what I call the fishing rod grip or if you want to think of it as a golf club grip you could think of it as I think you hold the golf club something like that but that thumb is further round and what we're essentially aiming for is we're aiming to have some clearance so that when you move the thumb down when you do a thumb stroke your thumb doesn't impede on your index finger it doesn't guess it doesn't hit that because once that gets in the way then you get this kind of tight feeling in the pattern in your hand the kinesthetic how it feels ends up feeling wrong yeah and what it does is your fingers and your thumbs collide with each other so were they want plenty of clearance if you were to play single notes the thumb would do the downstroke and the index on the same string this is a great little exercise if you just do one string thumb index thumb index just doing that and that's how you might use your fingers if you don't have a pick if you lose your pick we all losers picks in the washing machine so we do this that's a great exercise to help you to understand what you need to do to get this moving like this right so us and I it was deep other feet I would create this diagonal path across the strings you can see that the fingers are all staggered in this diagonal path and that means they there can stay into their own swim limbs all right but this is not clear it's not going to strike any of those other fingers I can't cat say explicitly that that technique is paramount to successful finger picking and finger style guitar you know if you want to travis has to happen right that's the traditional approach the seen old books there's too many fingers involved and this is why I'm saying this is an awesome easy pattern that makes you you chord sound the Mexi chord sound great so thumb what we do we're gonna use the thumb and the index that's all we're going to use two points of contact with the strings the reason I think this is good is because it takes me back to the idea of the share crop farmers back in the days back in the day doing blues doing bluegrass sort of stuff you know they had that we work in the fields all day and then they go and pick up a guitar until out and play some tunes and they didn't have immaculate you know manicured fingers and I don't not that a manicure manicured hands but soft hands like we we have in the modern world you know back then back in the day and in the 1920s and 1930s like this you know these hands they work they will worked so we want to use that same sort of idea and what we're actually going to do is we're just gonna use the thumb and the index and what we're gonna do is we're going to split our cards in two courses so what I mean by a course is a group of strings you could think of these as courses like you have courses of bricks in a building we can think of strings in that way but we're going to have a course of strings so we're going to use on this a minor chord for instance yeah this thumb on the ear string and my index finger is going to pluck up on the g string here and if I get that thumb through the forward you can see what happens there is again those two strings foot my a minor on getting my octave there that's a name that's an E and the thing is just to practice that on its hood what you get the feeling of that really more and it's important to goes the speed that you need to go up it's easy to copy somebody else in a tutorial and try and do it the same speed as them unless you've nailed the technique like they have then you're not going to play it that speedster we need to do things at your own pace so that you can observe what is going on you need to see what's going on so you can take it in it becomes a salient thought that you know exactly what it is is going on it's not just by passenger and it took this passive experience of learning you need to be able to clarify it's clarify to yourself this is what and the guitarra is mostly especially for beginners it's it's all about feel it's all about how that it feels in your hand as well as the visual patterns and how it sounds feel is the first way we really really get to grips with the guitar so feeling the thickness of the string the resistance that the string gives when you look it another thing I showed you how I do that with the thumb right I'm not using any nail on this this first finger and if I just dig in there the pins are go through to show people how to do this so you can see where that groove is there that's where I'm catching I'm not catching near the nail if I did catch near the nail yeah I'd have to grow my nails but I'm not growing my nails and I'm certainly never ever gonna wear acrylics because they look disgusted yeah yeah so and that's the first finger then you've got plenty of contact with that string but what's happening essentially with that index finger is all I'm doing is I'm pulling it and contracting it towards my palm there in its own swimlane so the thumb now here's part of the premise if you could do this on these two strings you can switch it down onto the next two strings so if I do this here I switch to these other strings here I've got an A and a see here which is my fifth and my minor third of the chord that third there on the B string that's the money note so you need to make sure that that's clear because that's the sad one yeah cuz minor chords are sad and if you don't pick out that one people are gonna get that it's a sad sounding chord so I'll put them together now here's the thing it's as simple as going thumb index on the a and the g string thumb index on the D and the B string so the idea is to do that super slow and what you could do is is actually if you want to give yourself more Headroom take the whole idea of playing a chord out of the equation until you get it down in this hand and just sit there like this you could do this while you're watching TV or anything and I'm just using those fingers to pick that pattern and it's a very simple pattern right so once you've got that down ticket nice and slow if you have to save the strings as you play it somebody love to comment about say as you play it is I'm a really big proponent of saying it as you play it so if I go hey G D be a G D B those are the strings I'm looking at that helps you to clarify what it is it's explicit now if I bother a minor chord on and I play that pattern with the chord you can hear that it breaks the cord up and it gives you it more interesting pattern so you can already hear that it's got a little bit more if I take a simple chord progression and put that underneath that what I'm gonna play I'm gonna play a see a jesus 4 /b but we're just gonna think of it as being a G an E minor and an F in first inversion it's an FF / C if you want to think of it in that way yeah but it's the easiest way to play an F because the whole of this thing is played on these four strings it's played on the ear the day the G and the B string so essentially these two fingers do not have to leave those strings at all yeah so if I start on this C and I'll play that slow like you can hear it so I'm going a string g string D string B string switch into that G's that I do I'll do a PDF file or a PDF for the chords and I'll put them in the description once I've cleaned up the video a bit we can think of that as the G and what's useful is keeping that index finger on there because what that does what that enables us to do is to have a kinesthetic reference point yeah you've got always got a contact with your cards here so so you always feel secure it's like having doing rock climbing with having a rule there to stop you from falling off the edge of the cliff so we've got this now that sounds pretty cool for just using thumb and an index finger to me that sounds really really nice it's a sweet sound it gives you lots of options to do with to do that another way to kind of bring some style into it is to do a sort of a volume AB and Fleur and that kind of creates emotion because what happens is you see if I whisper you have to listen more intently you have to really listen to what I'm saying my phone's going up there now and I don't want it to and it's doing it but it's doing it well ignore it right so here we can see that they're right that does that but what we can do is if we put this volume swells and flows in there then what what happened is he'll just give it a little bit more emotion and it'll suck the listener in and don't forget that you are the primary listener yeah so and it has to feed your enjoyment playing guitar is it should be about you enjoying it first and foremost yeah because it can be very often that the thing is the you think oh I'm learning guitar therefore I have to sound good for everybody else no it's about you enjoying playing guitar if you enjoy playing the guitar it'll make you want to practice more if you practice more you'll get better if you get better you'll be able to play stuff that other people are recognized and that's a big thumbs up as far as I'm concerned as a guitar teacher so so I'll do this as a kind of an ebb and flow of vibe if you're singing along with that then you're going to be creating motion you gotta be matching the vocal with the guitar and that's going to be absolutely amazing and awesome for you to be able to kind of create that that instantaneous improvise at this part this improvisation where you're playing and singing along alongside the guitar I don't know how many of you is actually playing sing at the same time which is probably a topic for a video the other technique that I said that would tag on the end here uses exactly the same fingers and I know this to be called a banjo frail so it's actually kind of a banjo technique and it's the same principle is if you don't have a plectrum then what you might do is you might want to use your fingers and and it can be a bit messy with your fingers if you don't know what you're doing but here's a way to tidy it up but also what's cool about this is it puts a baseline into your strumming as well and it's using the thumb and the index so this is like a little sort of bonus one I was only going to come on and do that one pattern what we do is if I take this C chord and I play these two strings I'm playing the a and the D string here therefore play those two there that gives me we could if we just want to think of it as one two three four one two and then what we do is we use the nails on the these fingers here you can just use your index finger if you want and what we do is we do a little strum down serve thumb index because you've looked up with the index if you strum down with the back of the nail yeah you get a good sound out of that and then to bring it so that you've got four strums on that you get thumb index nail pad of the finger coming back up the son has decided to shock shine really really brightly right so thumb index nail pad thumb index nail pads and then what that does is it gives us four what can also do like I says I could use more fingers instead of just using an index finger if I use three fingers these three fingers here I get a bigger sound I actually can't quite like too vigorously through my fingers out as a good way to stroke [Applause] same cause see the G says 4 /b and a minor as /c we're just gonna think of it sing G a minor that's the easiest way to think about it don't get too lost in the minutiae of what chords are which anyhow so if you've enjoyed that do the SUBSCRIBE thing let me know what about the quality of this live do I need to use the BT Home Hub guys I should just mention if you've tuned in to this live I'm going to sort out this live situation and I'm going to be doing something in January called guitar Jim it's where we're gonna I'm gonna show you how to get fit on guitar we're gonna do gym sessions guided sessions they're going to be live where we get the metronome on and we go through a bunch of exercises that get you guitar fit so I'd love to see you on here if you want to make sure you subscribe so you don't miss out on any of that get the notification Bell clicks as well so that you don't miss out on when those classes go alive because there will be pretty awesome in getting your speed up we'll be tackling scales we'll be tackling chord changes and lots of lots of good stuff that is practical to making you a better guitar player because I want to help you become a better guitar player because there's too much nonsense in this world and we need good stuff and good stuff is things like playing guitar so let's get let's crack on let's get it done yeah and I will see you in a future video hope you enjoyed that if you did subscribe like all that stuff comment and and let me know what you think below I'll drop that PDF in there as well with those chord changes take care today