How to Position Fingers in Blues Fingerpicking

Video Transcript

"So, the next thing you might want to think about is which finger you want to use to play which string. And this is really a question of personal choice. I mean, from what I understand, Mississippi John Hurt, only ever used his thumb, and his first finger and his middle finger and so, you know, if you ever heard some of that music that's pretty incredible. It's a lot of sound you get out of just three fingers. I personally like to use my ring finger some times. There are a couple of songs that I play where I actually bring my pinkie into it. But, again, there's no right or wrong way to this. It's really a question of comfort and personal choice. One kind of way to maybe break it up in your mind is, you know, is what you kind of want to do is dedicate one finger per string. So, let's say you might want to dedicate your thumb to, you know, well the thumb is kind of the exception, you might want to kind of dedicate your thumb to like the bottom three strings, kind of going back and forth between these. And then, I don't know, let's say you want to play with these three fingers, then could say well ring finger would be the high E, middle finger will be the D, and then the index finger will be the, I'm sorry this is not an E, B and then a G. So then the index finger on the G. So, you know, so then all the finger picking you would do would have kind of those fingers dedicated to those strings. So, without doing anything too complex, just again hold the chord with your left hand and just practice being able to isolate the notes of the chord by arpeggiating them and, what that means is to arpeggiate a chord is to just play the notes in a chord separately. So, you know, if I was strumming a song like "Blue Moon," for example, you know, I might just go, C to A-minor, to F to G, like that. But if you were going to arpeggiate it, again, you might want to dedicate your thumb to the bottom two or three things and then, let's say, take these three fingers to the top three and then just break the chord up."