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My first video: solo warmness on soul guitar practice
“The Hell Song” - Sum41
1st Attempt at Fingerpicking - "Good Riddance"
The basics | Week 1
Impromptu acoustic “Sally’s song”
Misfits “Attitude”
Matt Wildcat

1st Attempt at Fingerpicking - "Good Riddance"

Here's my first ever attempt at fingerpicking! It's something I never thought I'd find myself doing, so it's gonna be a long road of hard work to get somewhere, but I wanted to be able to show my progress as I keep working at it and improving, so here's the first step!

It's messy, it's rambling, it's probably not very clear and there's a whole list of things to work on, but I'm already proud of myself for picking it up in the first place and managing to wrap my head around how the basics work (Thanks to the lessons on here, of course!) I'll be updating with more videos as I go, gonna make this my main little project for a while (Like NRtD was). Hope you enjoy!
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Alicia Willis
I think you are doing fabulous! My advice may not be grear and I’m going to try to go with what works for me and try to hit the spots you mentions.
first, you mentioned placement of your picking hand. When I play acoustic I too prefer the area closest to the bridge as well . There’s nothing wrong with that. Do what makes you feel comfortable. However, you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned you were inadvertently muting the notes. That’s something that just takes practice. I’ve found with that hand placement it’s so easy to accidentally mute the notes. Just be mindful and find something comfortable that works for you.

You also mentioned hooking your thumb over the top. This is awesome but impossible for some chords. Like when you play the c chord, your thumb can be near the top of the neck but it’s difficult to “hook” it around. Also with chords like D it’s impossible to hook your thumb for that. don’t worry about it !

you played a chord after your G and I’m pretty sure that’s a Cadd9 you mentioned. (The one you said you didn’t know what it was)

I know I’m all over the place lol. I hope I’ve helped. @Jak Angelescu was my advice terrible ?! I’m sure you have loads of advice! 😘
 
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Alicia Willis
Also, this is one of my favorite songs ! It’s so beautiful and you are doing so good ! Don’t overthink it ! Just enjoy playing and go with it ! At the end of the day it’s all about having fun ! 😃
 
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Dominik Gräber
Are you kidding me? That is a great start!! It was the total opposite of awful ;) I think you should just keep going and play around with it until you get it. I basicly learned fingerpicking with the Last of Us theme song and Buried Alive although I developed a bad habit of using one finger for multiple strings because it was more comfortable at the time. So it's great to see you get it right from the start!
 
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Matt Wildcat
Alicia Willis said:
I think you are doing fabulous! My advice may not be grear and I’m going to try to go with what works for me and try to hit the spots you mentions.
first, you mentioned placement of your picking hand. When I play acoustic I too prefer the area closest to the bridge as well . There’s nothing wrong with that. Do what makes you feel comfortable. However, you hit the nail on the head when you mentioned you were inadvertently muting the notes. That’s something that just takes practice. I’ve found with that hand placement it’s so easy to accidentally mute the notes. Just be mindful and find something comfortable that works for you.

You also mentioned hooking your thumb over the top. This is awesome but impossible for some chords. Like when you play the c chord, your thumb can be near the top of the neck but it’s difficult to “hook” it around. Also with chords like D it’s impossible to hook your thumb for that. don’t worry about it !

you played a chord after your G and I’m pretty sure that’s a Cadd9 you mentioned. (The one you said you didn’t know what it was)

I know I’m all over the place lol. I hope I’ve helped. @Jak Angelescu was my advice terrible ?! I’m sure you have loads of advice! 😘
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This is super helpful!! I'll make sure I keep working on the hand placement a bit then just to try minimise the muting as much as possible! For my fretting hand, I don't think my thumb has ever really known what to do, it just kinda goes where it feels comfortable, and sometimes it works. It's probably something to just keep in mind but not focus too hard on? Also yes, that's the chord! It completely slipped my mind, it's a new one for me XD

Thank you so much for your advice, it's been really great to help me know where to focus and improve on! Thank you!
 
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Matt Wildcat
Dominik Graeber said:
Are you kidding me? That is a great start!! It was the total opposite of awful ;) I think you should just keep going and play around with it until you get it. I basicly learned fingerpicking with the Last of Us theme song and Buried Alive although I developed a bad habit of using one finger for multiple strings because it was more comfortable at the time. So it's great to see you get it right from the start!
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Thank you!! It's really funny you should mention The Last of Us, that was the one my brother chose when he briefly learned fingerpicking, might have to get him to teach me to give me another thing to work on lol.
 
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Fahol
You are right to seek support with your right hand, however, I still have the impression that the hand is floating. When I do fingers picking, I bump my thumb on the string in order to reinforce the support (when it's possible!). I will try to make a video of some arppegios .. :)

Anyway, enjoyed as allways !
 
Ben newton
This is a cool song! Awesome song. A song I'd highly recommend for practicing finger picking is REM's Everybody Hurts. Its quite a sad tune, very mellow, but quite a straight forward pattern.

With finger picking, it can feel quite strange, especially when we are told to try and get used to that pick at the start! When I practice finger picking, I took one chord and played through the chord finger style. Just run the chord with in an order until comfortable with the right hand picking pattern. Then start changing the chords about, following the same right hand picking pattern.

With regards to the right hand placement when finger picking (or any type of technique) we all follow advice (or most of us anyway) and then we gradually find what is comfortable for us. It's kinda like being told how to hold a pick. Theres a way, but at the end of the day, it's down to personal preference and comfort. If you are happy with your hand on the bridge then absolutely go with it, but be careful with the strain you lightly touched upon. If you are suspicious of anything like that, try and re-adjust your technique for comfort. For example, on the rarest of occasions where I fingerpick, I adopt a classical style approach and allow my hand to float over the strings as apposed to attaching my hand to the body of the guitar. Absolutely each to their own though! As long as its comfortable. I hardly ever finger pick because of my approach, so I work on hybrid more so instead :) Keep practicing!
 
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Matt Wildcat
Ben newton said:
This is a cool song! Awesome song. A song I'd highly recommend for practicing finger picking is REM's Everybody Hurts. Its quite a sad tune, very mellow, but quite a straight forward pattern.

With finger picking, it can feel quite strange, especially when we are told to try and get used to that pick at the start! When I practice finger picking, I took one chord and played through the chord finger style. Just run the chord with in an order until comfortable with the right hand picking pattern. Then start changing the chords about, following the same right hand picking pattern.

With regards to the right hand placement when finger picking (or any type of technique) we all follow advice (or most of us anyway) and then we gradually find what is comfortable for us. It's kinda like being told how to hold a pick. Theres a way, but at the end of the day, it's down to personal preference and comfort. If you are happy with your hand on the bridge then absolutely go with it, but be careful with the strain you lightly touched upon. If you are suspicious of anything like that, try and re-adjust your technique for comfort. For example, on the rarest of occasions where I fingerpick, I adopt a classical style approach and allow my hand to float over the strings as apposed to attaching my hand to the body of the guitar. Absolutely each to their own though! As long as its comfortable. I hardly ever finger pick because of my approach, so I work on hybrid more so instead :) Keep practicing!
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I'll give that one a go! My college music teacher wants me to try Romance d'amour, so that's gonna be fun XD
It's definitely really strange, but I've been keeping at it over the last few days and I think I've gotten a lot better, I just gotta stop rushing ahead of myself and getting all mixed up. I think that approach will definitely help me to get more comfortable and familiar with it though!

This is also really helpful to hear! I always worry that, since I picked up a lot of bad habits when I first started playing, that there was like one perfect way to do everything and if it wasn't that, it was really bad, but trying things one way sometimes just wasn't working for me. I'll definitely keep moving it about to see what works best, hopefully I'll find something that works out just right! Thank you!
 
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