How to Thumb the Baseline in Blues Fingerpicking

"Okay, so, just quickly, let me show you a little example of what I mean by the right hand doing two things. The thumb is doing kind of the bass line, a rhythmic bass line, or kind of a one, two, one, two, type of a rhythm where the other four fingers are not really all over the place, but they're kind of playing on the offbeat, kind of these syncopated notes. So, here's just kind of a short example of what I mean. And you might want to watch, just kind of the fact that my thumb is really kind of rhythmically detached from my other fingers. My thumb is going to be doing that rhythmic one, two, one, two, whereas the rest of my fingers are doing all kinds of other things. Okay? So. Right, see so, so that sound, which is again, the country blues sound, kind of, sort of a ragtime sound, comes from the fact that that whole time my thumb was just going, one, two, one, two, one, two, and was kind of on autopilot. And that's really a good way to think about it. You need to practice that thumb movement enough where that thumb kind of goes on autopilot so that you can then sort of free your mind to work with the other three fingers. Right? Free your mind and the other three fingers will follow. Right. So, that's kind of the idea. So, think about, okay, well what kind of rhythms can you do with the thumb. What kinds of structure can you do with the thumb? Again, I like to kind of keep it to a one, two, one, two type rhythm. But, you know, think about, well it's sort of doing the bass line of the song, so you're really going to kind of keep the thumb limited to those bottom three strings, the E, the A and the D. And, you know, you're obviously going to return to the root note a lot. So, if I play a G chord, here's the root note, it's going to be the G on the E string. But, you know, to make it interesting, you might want to alternate between the root and the fifth, for example, so that's between the E string and the D string, if I'm playing a G chord. Right? So like, one, two, one, two, one, two. Right? So you can practice that. And then, if you want to get even a little more fancy with it, you can throw the third in there. So, sort of like this. You know, and you can mix it up too. But the most important thing is to practice those little thumb patterns enough so that it just becomes second nature and you can really kind of put that thumb on autopilot."