Hand Positions in Blues Fingerpicking

Video Transcript

"Okay, so I want to talk a little bit about the positioning of your hands. Again, when you start out learning this style, you don't really have to think about the left hand that much. I mean if you know a few chords, all you have to do is just finger them and just kind of forget about that hand. So, whatever is comfortable for you to do with your left hand in terms of just fingering chords, you know, however you want to do that is fine. Generally, you don't want to be tense or tight, you know, you kind of want your wrist to be loose and I like to hook my left thumb kind of over the top of the neck like this, just to kind of, you know, so your hand is kind of hanging off the guitar. I think a lot of guitar players do that. But for finger picking, let's talk about the right hand. When you play guitar with a strumming style, like with a pick or with your, just kind of with your thumb strumming, it's important to have in that style, to kind of have a loose wrist and kind of a loose fluid motion. You know, if you're kind of strumming like this, you want to kind of have a loose, fluid motion. But with finger picking, my opinion is you kind of want the opposite. If you want to develop control over what your fingers are doing, I like to have my wrist a little bit more fixed, in a little bit more of a fixed position. So, if I was to sort of, you know, if you play with a strumming style, right, you notice how my hand is kind of hovering over the strings, right? Well, if I was going to do that with a finger picking style, to me, it's really hard to control the notes and kind of control what my fingers are doing, if I just have my hand hovering over the strings like that, you know. You know, it's hard, it's hard to that and I kind of struggle with that. So what I like to do and, what a lot of fingerpickers will do, is they'll actually plant kind of the ball of their hand kind of just right on the face of the guitar above the strings like this. And so what that does, is now you've anchored your right hand and it doesn't mean you want to make, you know, your wrist tight or you want to tense up, but you just anchor your hand and now your fingers just sort of become appendages that are working from that anchor point instead of hovering over the whole thing like a flock of birds or something like that. So, what I like to do for finger picking is to just anchor my hand, anchor the ball of my hand, on the face of the guitar and then that just kind of serves as a kind of attachment point for everything else you know."