Chords for The BEST Beginner Fingerstyle Guitar Lesson

This is one section of my six-part fingerpicking jumpstart course.
This is a [G] course that's going to take you from [Eb] knowing absolutely nothing about fingerpicking
all the way to playing your first song.
Now one thing before you start, you're going to need the
tablature for this course.
It's a six-part course and there's tabs for each section and I want you
to have those.
So I've created a free course guide that contains links to every lesson,
[G] the tabs that are necessary [E] for every lesson, [F]
and the arrangement of the song that you're going to
[E] play at the end.
All you have to do to get this free course guide is click the link here in the
video or in the [C] description.
_ _ [Eb] _ _ [C] _ _ [Ab] _ _
_ _ _ _ Welcome to the fingerpicking [C]
jumpstart course.
This is a course
that's going to take you from not knowing anything about fingerpicking at all to playing a full song
in just seven days.
Now I know what you're thinking, whoa I don't know anything about
fingerpicking.
I heard it's really hard.
It sounds really hard.
Maybe this isn't the best place to
start and I'm here to tell you [Abm] that's not true.
After teaching over a thousand students, I can
confidently say that starting with fingerpicking is actually a great place to start because it's
methodical and once you get the technique down you can use it all over the place.
Not just in the song
I'm going to teach you, but in your own playing, in other songs.
It's a great skill to have and it's a
foundational one.
In this course we're going to start with just getting familiar with the strings.
Then we're going to move on to using the thumb as the rhythm section and in section three [G] we're going
to integrate the pinch.
This is [E] one of the most crucial elements to fingerpicking.
In lesson four
we're going to go ahead and take that pinch and stagger it or what I call staggering and introduce
eighth notes.
In lesson five we're going to mix up quarter notes and eighth notes, straight pinches
and staggered pinches so you can create your own fingerpicking patterns.
In lesson six we're
going to learn some chords.
Well chords that you probably already know, but we're going to learn how
to modify them [E] so that you can adjust to a song and integrate the melody into the chord shape.
[Ab] By the very end you'll be [F] able to learn [Eb] the song Freight Train which is a [N] classic fingerpicking
tune.
One that you absolutely need to know.
So without further ado let's get started with getting
familiar with the strings.
So to get familiar with the strings we're going to kind of learn what I'll
call the golden rule of fingerpicking.
Now as with any rule this rule is meant to be broken,
but for the sake of getting familiar with the strings we're going to follow it to a t right here.
Now this rule this is applied to your basic three finger style fingerpicking and it's it's something
that kind of helps put some borders on what you can [F] do so that you can really get a good [G] tactile
[Eb] feel and understanding for the strings.
So if you look at the first line on your tablature
it's literally just about getting familiar with the open strings.
There's no fretting involved on
that very first line.
One thing before we get started to actually playing I want to make sure
you understand the notation.
Okay you're going to see a little letter p by some of the notes
and a little letter i by some of the notes and a litter little letter [D] m by some of the notes.
[E]
The p stands for the thumb, the i stands for the index, and the m the middle finger.
Okay this is
so that when you're looking at your notation you can say oh I need my [D] thumb to hit that particular
note [Eb] or my middle finger to hit that particular note.
So if we look at that first line the uh
this this [Ab] line again it [Gb] really explains the golden rule of fingerpicking.
We're looking at the e [G] a
and [Gb] d string and the thumb is going to be responsible for all of those.
So what I want you
to do is go ahead and hit the low e string with your [E] thumb, _ _ _ hit the a [Gbm] string with your thumb,
[A] _ _ _
the d string with your [D] thumb.
_ _ So far that's going to be [E] the thumbs zone we'll call it.
[Bb] Now moving to
[F] the g and the b string the index finger [Eb] is going to be responsible for those.
So we're going to
hit the g string with the index [G] finger _ _ and then the b string with the [B] index finger _ _ _ _ _ [Abm] and then the
high e all by [G] its lonesome on top we're going to use [E] our middle finger on our picking hand and
we're going to go ahead and hit that string open. _ _ _ _
_ Now this seems like a very simple exercise [Abm] but I
don't want you to breeze through it.
This is again kind of a foundational element of finger
picking.
That thumb is going to be responsible again for the low three [A] strings, _ [D] _ [G] index finger for
the g and b _ [B] and [Gb] middle finger for [Em] the high e.
Now again I'm going to call this the golden rule but
[Gb] remember rules are meant to be broken but for this style we're going to adhere to it pretty closely.
Now to reinforce kind of what the [Ab] thumb's responsible [Gb] for, what the index is [Eb] responsible for
and what the middle finger is [Abm] responsible for I want you to just grab [G] a basic g chord and this
really could be [E] any six string chord but for [Gb] the sake of example I'm [Eb] going to use a g.
My ring
finger will be on the third fret of the low e, middle finger second fret of the a and pinky finger
[E] third fret of the high e string and we're just going to kind of just do the thumb.
So the thumb's
going to kind of _ travel along its path on those low three strings the e a and d and I just want
to use the thumb here so it's going to [G] look like this. _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ [D] _ _ _ This is [C] going to help your thumb get used
to hitting the right [Eb] string and kind of working in that area.
[Gbm] Then we're going to move to the index
finger still holding down [C] a g chord or really any six string chord.
We're going to use the index
finger [G] and just bop back and forth between the g string and the b string like so _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ and then
ultimately we'll end [F] up on the high e string and we're going to use our middle finger repeatedly
to hit that on just a nice steady [G] beat. _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ Again this is a very simple [Eb] exercise but an absolute
necessary one so that you can be familiar with the strings.
The whole idea of this lesson is to get
familiar with the strings so when we move on to our next lesson which is really focused on the
thumb and its movement over bass lines you'll be totally ready.
You've just finished one section of
my six-part finger picking jumpstart course.
This is a course that takes you from knowing absolutely
nothing about finger picking all the way to being able to play a song with the technique.
Now each
of these six lessons has corresponding tablature plus at the end of doing all these lessons you'll
be able to play a simple arrangement of the tune Freight Train but you'll need the tab to do so.
So I've created a course guide which contains links to all six lessons, the tablature for each
lesson and the tablature for the arrangement of Freight Train.
All you have to do to get this free
course guide is click the link in the video or in the description.
Thanks a lot for