 Hi guys, this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music. In this guitar lesson, I'm going to introduce you to five really popular and most practiced finger style or finger picking patterns for the acoustic guitar. Now most of these are influenced by not only the guitar, it could be influenced by the banjo, by the mandolin and other folk instruments but generally when you play the guitar with your fingers you're tending to deal with a lot of interesting groovy stuff with a lot of independence. What I mean by that is coming from a piano perspective is you have one ingredient or one part of the hand which will produce something like what the left hand of the piano does while the other ingredients or the other fingers will do or the right hand does something like the bass clef and the treble clef. It's very different than you know just strumming a chord, so the finger patterns can access each individual string and that's pretty much the workflow we are going to follow throughout this lesson. So we are going to use these three fingers to play most of our patterns, in fact all of the patterns, there are some guitar players who I've seen who use even the ring finger you know, I'm not so confident with that and I tend to first of all the way you sit or the way you position yourself try to be as relaxed as possible and the way I do it is I try and keep my hand at an angle and you're going to use whenever you play with your, whenever you play with the index finger and the middle finger they are going to be pulling towards you, they are going to be coming back towards you and ideally at an angle you don't want to keep it straight otherwise your wrist will hurt. So you are pulling it back like this, at an angle, some people also grow some nails and or use picks which I don't do because I am primarily a piano player, so while your thumb will push down. So this is generally how I am placing my thumb and pretty much all of the work comes from these three fingers, thumb, index, middle. Now what do I do with the other two fingers? Well what I prefer is I prefer to just leave them on the guitar board, on the wood, it provides an additional support and if I ever need to use it for something you know maybe some percussion noise or to mute it then I will bring it into play but otherwise it's pretty much just stationed on the guitar itself just touching because if I keep it in the air I don't know just feels like a little bit of a bad habit sometimes the fingers go up and it doesn't provide that opposing force which you need to kind of secure your hand firm on the instrument. As far as my left hand goes which is the hand which pretty much drives the guitar around to produce melodies, chords and what not, you just learn whatever chords you would normally learn be it C major, G major, D minor, A minor, E minor, F major, G major, C. It's just the right hand or the engine or the rhythm hand which is going to change and that's what I am pretty much going to do in this lesson. We are going to do five approaches for finger style playing and you will have this also ready to download as a notation file with tabs so do consider being a member on our Patreon page patreon.com forward slash Jason Zach there'll also be some of my notes for not only the this lesson but also lessons in the past and which are coming up in the future and do consider being a part of our channel the Nathaniel School of Music channel all you have to do is hit the subscribe button and turn on the bell icon for regular notifications we do quite a few lessons we do lessons on song analysis music theory year training piano guitar bass percussion production and what not so do consider being a part of our channel right so let's get cracking with our finger style guitar patterns first of all just to get our fingers engaged and a very popular pattern which most people start off with even I do this a lot till this day would just be to roll four notes with these three fingers of yours some people may even use their ring I just find that my fingers are a bit too big for the guitar I'm more of a bass player if you if I think about it so how I go about it is play the thumb for the a string C now I'm holding C major chord do with anything but just for the explanation sake I'm just choosing C major so thumb thumb index middle okay C major and slowly but surely try to get the rhythm or the engine pumping and figure out a cyclic effect with your thumb as well just a natural flow or the natural movement of a cycle just to get better and better with it put in some effort and to make it interesting you can do a nice chord pattern with me see gee gee with the base you just fret these two notes that's B open D G D so C major G then D minor you could do minor you need to bring your thumb to the third string from the top the D string which will give you a natural D and you fret these notes with your left hand pinky and index and then a minor okay back to C major you know if you're uncomfortable with four notes you can even do this with three notes you could just do thumb index middle index you can avoid the dub thumb on two notes you can just do you like to move your middle to the E okay so broken up every note is played individually sort of like an arpeggio you could call it okay and another way to maybe take this a bit more forward could be make an elongated pattern double the time of what it is so to do that I'll play it once for you okay so you're creating an eight note plucking arpeggio pattern as opposed to the earlier method which was just four notes now you're trying to take it up to eight one two three four five six seven eight one two three another nice way to count this could be one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and one and two and okay the second chord and two and three and four and one and two open E or you could fret this and play G so C major G major D minor just to get some chords into the play a minor okay it's back to the progression again C major G major D minor A minor you could do a little A bass D minor D minor G major back to A minor right guys so that was pattern number ones we started with the four note one and play all the four notes or you can play three notes over a four beat cycle if you will one two three four or you could elongate the pattern over an eight beat cycle okay so another thing you could try is something more pop-ish where you could divide the beats irregularly you can do something like one two three one two three one two one two three one two three one two three okay so those that's That's the first line of patterns which basically include playing notes one by one in arpeggio. So these are all arpeggio patterns. Let's now move forward to the next finger style technique. Right, so this one uses a little bit of percussion. You can go. So I'm taking a G major chord this way. G, low bass. So essentially what your thumb does on the guitar is pretty much play chord roots. So if it's G major, it's going to play G, if it's C major, it's going to play C and so on and so forth. So that's what your thumb does while the other two fingers will be playing the remaining notes of the chord. So I have this pattern for you. This is a pattern a lot of people play. Like it's something most people start off with, I guess, on the guitar. So it goes thumb and then play two notes with your index as well as your middle finger. Thumb and then you're getting this double stop thing going so and then you whack the guitar a little bit. Not too hard but just get a nice percussion sound going. Okay, so this is the pattern 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and few off beats here because I'm dividing the beat into two units. Later I'm going to show you, you can divide it further. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and let's change the chord. 1 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and or you can change the chords a bit faster. 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1. Just for the last chord you can ignore the and just do what we discussed earlier. Play all the notes one by one, right? For the last chord I'm just sliding my hand from the C major shape just to a nice open D major chord like an add four sound. So G, B, G over B basically then C, add nine, add D. Some reason I like playing D in most of the chords on the guitar so G, D, C. So this pattern basically has three ingredients your thumb starting off then a double stop or two notes like a mini chord if you will and then a nice chunk, a nice percussion noise on your guitar. So start with this, so if you're bored with dividing by two you can also then divide by four you can do something like 1 and 1 and 2 and 1 and 1 and get in those E's and the E's 1 and 2 and 3 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 1 and 1 and 2 and 3. Or else if you want to divide by three also known as an eighth note triplet where the beat gets divided into three units we can call count it as 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 1 and 2 and 3 and 4. So you count it as 1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and 3 and 4 and 4 and 3 and 4 and 4 and 3 and 4 and 4 and 4. So depending on the time field what I call as time field you can divide by two and get this pattern, that's a quaver pattern, a semi quaver pattern or a triplet pattern. So the ingredients are your thumb for the first root of the chord, then the double stop playing two notes of the chord and then of course the whack or the percussion. So this is the second technique for finger style guitar playing, let's now move on to the third. The third technique is what we call as the Travis style picking method and there are two levels to it if you will. The first level is I am just going to demonstrate using the G major chord, so this is how it works in the simple way, so you pluck the outer two notes, that's your root of the chord and the upper structure, the upper note in this case B and then you do the inner one and you could count it as quavars, that's the basic way of doing this. Now you have to move forward in time, so to do that you can either go, that means I am now doing crotchets with my thumb or quarter notes with my thumb, G, G, G or I could even do minims, check that out, the other two fingers are going, while my thumb is going G, G, G or I can even go very lazy, G, G, on the pulse. This is more common, thick pattern it sounds quite good with most chord progressions, most songs, if you want to make this more interesting, we do something like keep this thumb going, the thumb will not change, you are just adding, you start with both the outer notes, G, G, G, if I were to sing just the upper two notes and not the thumb, it can be something like this, that's how it sounds. So practice that over different chords, chords changes are very fast, go back to the easy or the quick change one, the simple Travis pattern, if the chords last bring in the other groove and the thing with finger style playing is you don't have to play all the six strings when you are playing chords, so it offers a nice concept where you could play your chords as either, you know, the index finger playing a note on this string and the pinky playing on the higher string and they are together a minor third apart, P, D, that would also be a minor but you can convert that into major, so when you are playing finger style it may be good to know the minor third which is, will be very close or just one fret away from the root while a major third is two frets away or you skip one and then play the major third, so you can get patterns like this, major, minor, major and of course with the pattern, the more groovy Travis pattern, right guys so that was finger style pattern number three, let's move forward to pattern number four, right so in this melodic approach to finger style playing, you start with a double stop or a group of notes and the top most note will be your melody, so let's say off the top I am playing C major chord and I just keep repeating the C, now this feels a bit boring and not so melodic, so what you could do is move the C to other notes in the scale, so I could do C, B, D, C on the upper strings maybe go to the last, E, D, C and if you climb the guitar with that major third, minor third technique which I told you earlier, very nice melodic stuff almost like a hook which you are creating for a song like for instance this, that's out of the melody, stuff like focus on the upper note, upper register and make that melodic that's basically the other finger style pattern, I have one more for you before we sign off and that is a time signature which needs no introduction, it's the 6-8 rhythm, so it sounds something like this, how do we count this? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, so we could use a very popular pattern of chords used in House of the Rising Sun, A minor, C major, D major I am playing like this, F major, so that's A minor, C major, D major, F, A minor, C major, E, 7th, let's see how that works with 6-8, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 3, 4, 5, 6, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, so to do 6-8 it's almost like the same thing we learned in the beginning but that was over 4-4, so to make it 6-8, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, you have to come back and you get all these famous songs, let's go back to House of the Rising Sun you could also make it interesting by doing something like this bring in a 16th note there right guys, so those are 5 finger style guitar patterns or approaches or techniques whatever you want to call them I've shown them on slightly different chord progressions but fairly simple chords on the guitar and I hope you can apply it with a variety of music which you play do leave us a comment with what you thought about the lesson and do give us your suggestions in the comments for anything you'd like us to teach you in the future as well and most of these rhythm patterns will be found on our Patreon you could consider heading over to patreon.com the link is in the description and do consider a monthly subscription on that platform you will get content and supplementary material for almost all of our lessons which we have done in the past and will continue to do in the future right guys, thanks a ton for watching, again this is Jason Zach from Nathaniel School of Music, cheers