Strumming vs. Arpeggio in Blues Fingerpicking

Video Transcript

"So, when people learn to play guitar, they spend a lot of time focusing on the left hand, which is the hand that fingers the chords. And there's a lot you can learn, you know, in terms of what the left hand is doing. How to play major chords, minor chords, seventh chords and kind of where your fingers go. But, you know, another important thing that a lot of guitar players don't focus on until later is what to do with the right hand. Right, so, I can hold a chord here with my left hand. So, for example, an open E, and just leave it there. And so now the question is what is my right hand going to do. So, you can just strum, you know, campfire style, and there's a of music you can play that way, a lot of songs you can play by just strumming the chord. But there's a whole other universe of music and sound that can be opened up if you learn kind of a structured way to play the notes in a chords separately, without ever changing anything your left hand is doing. Now, I'm just going to leave my left hand as it is and my right hand, I'm just going to start playing these notes individually and you can kind of hear kind of the difference between strumming and fingerpicking. So, I mean, that's a little bit boring because I'm not really doing anything with my left hand, but I think it's more interesting than just strumming and so, the next thing to learn is how to do that fingerpicking in sort of a structured way."