Finger Picking: Arpeggio-Time
Preface (skip if this isn’t your first time here):
THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE WHO DON’T KNOW ANYTHING USEFUL ABOUT THE GUITAR!
It’s because no one either showed them anything useful or they never found out the basics of playing guitar.
DON’T BE LIKE THEM!
Here we are going to talk about those guitar basics in bite-sized chunks.
Hopefully, this will give you everything necessary to understand how to play the instrument, fix any flaws in your playing, and form ideas on how to change things up in your technique.
Alright we’ve made it. This is the finale of the Guitar Basics Series. You can do it all now: play tab, play chords and bar chords, and now it’s time to play arpeggios with your right hand fingers.
“What are arpeggios?”
“Arpeggio” means to break up the chords you play. It means you no only strum the whole chord, now you pluck one string at a time.
Remember when you played the individual guitar strings to make sure your chords were sounding good?
Those were arpeggios.
Now we’re going to do the advanced version of that with our right hand.
We’ll start with the tab below. Just play it in whatever way you know how.
Now play it free stroke with the right hand fingers indicated.
Okay, now let’s try a couple different patterns. Everything is just going to be open strings for now, we’ll add the left hand momentarily.
It’s time to add some actual chords. You can play the chords normally with your left hand or you can just finger the notes indicated in the tab. You’re still arpeggiating the chord either way.
Remember to free stroke everything.
When you pluck, bring your fingers into your palm and keep your thumb and fingers out of each other’s way by keeping your hand in the “x-position.”
Here’s some chord progressions that’ll have you plucking arpeggios:
Now time for some songs:
Congratulations on making it to the end of this amazing series. You can play everything that makes up the basis of guitar technique. Now you have all the tools that will help you play everything and anything you want. Go forth and rock!