How to develop good fingerpicking technique

Developing good fingerpicking technique requires time, focus, patience, and practice, but don’t let that put you off. This juice is worth the squeeze.

Like most techniques, it’s best to break fingerpicking down into more manageable chunks first. Luckily for you, we’re going to provide you with some excellent chunks today!

We’ll cover the basic terminology and give you some example exercises to start practicing right away.

Set a goal and make a plan

Before you start with the exercises below, make a plan. We know sitting down and practicing your guitar can be a little boring at times, so a solid plan will help keep you on track.

• Repeating scales and patterns over and over again requires discipline.
• Discipline is easier to achieve and maintain if it’s part of something bigger.
• If it’s clear to you why you’re practicing and what you want to achieve, it’ll be much easier to stay on the course and do the job.

Make a schedule for yourself where a few times a week you sit down and do these fingerstyle exercises for 20-30 minutes.

Click here to find out on how to set guitar goals.

Components of fingerstyle picking

The main things you need to develop a great fingerpicking technique:

• Finger dexterity
• Fretting- and picking-hand coordination
• Rhythm

As you move on to advanced fingerstyle playing, you’ll also need to understand harmonization, chord positions, and melodic phrases but we’ll set that aside for now.

First things first. Stretching is essential for your fingers – on both hands!

• Do some finger stretches to loosen up and be more flexible.
• You’ll have more control over how you move your fingers once they’re warmed up.
• Stretching also helps avoid injury.

It’s also important that you’re relaxed. Your picking hand should be in a comfortable position where it’s not tense as your play along the fretboard.

Finger names for guitar

To make it easier to know which finger goes where we have some handy labels.

When you’re looking at fingerpicking patterns, it’ll sometime display which finger you should use to pluck the string or note.

Fretting hand

T - Thumb

1 - Index finger

2 - Middle finger

3 - Ring finger

4 - Pinky finger.

Picking hand

If you’re a classical guitarist, this is how you’ll often read each finger for the picking hand:

T – p

1 – i

2 – m

3 – a

4 – c

For simplicity, we’ll just use finger numbers for the picking hand in this article.

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Exercise 1

We’ll start by only focusing on the picking hand. After a couple of exercises, we’ll introduce the fretting hand as well.

With this exercise, you’ll familiarize yourself with using your picking hand to pluck the strings.

What you’ll do is alternate the picking finger for each note. Start with only using your Thumb (T) and your index finger (1), like this:

T - 1 - T - 1 - T - 1

• As you repeat this phrase, really make sure you pluck each string with precision and accuracy to get a good tone.
• A good tone is round and soft, rather than harsh and piercing.

Pay attention to the angle of your hand and wrist – try to keep a comfortable and consistent position.

Next, you’ll add one more finger, so the plucking pattern will be this:

T - 1 - 2 - 1 - T - 1 - 2 - 1 - T

Lastly, we’ll do the same with the ring finger added.

T - 1 - 2 - 3 - 2 - 1 - T - 1 - 2 - 3 - 2 - 1 - T

• It’ll take a little time to build up natural coordination between the fingers.
• Focus on each finger and each note.
• Make sure each string is plucked with precision and sounds clean.

Exercise 2

This next exercise will be the same pattern but across several strings. We want to build finger independence and control.

• Some fingers are stronger than others and may pluck the string harder.
• Try to avoid these unintentional changes in volume.
• Aim to make each pluck sound consistent.

Here is the second exercise. By playing this, you’re also playing the intro to Metallica’s Nothing Else Matters:

The picking hand should be set up on the strings like this:

• Thumb on low E
• Index finger on G
• Middle finger on B
• Ring finger on high e

We recommend you play along to a metronome. You can find our free online metronome here.

• Metronomes are the best tool for working on timing.
• Start with a slow tempo and gradually increase it as you get more comfortable.
• Rushing it will only lead to sloppy playing and bad habits.

As you see, the thumb is playing the bass note. More often than not, that will be job the of the thumb.

You’ll generally use the thumb on the Low E, A, and D strings. There are always exceptions, but this is a good… rule of thumb 😉

Now that you have a feel for what it’s like to use your fingers, let’s try it out on some chords.