Playing a Baseline & Syncopation: Fingerpicking

"Okay, so now what you can do is just think about these elements we've talked about. Okay? You know and, still forget about the left hand for now, I'm just going to hold a C chord with my left hand and just kind of forget about it. Okay. But what are the elements we've talked about? We've talked about you need to separate your thumb from your other fingers, just kind of in you head. Kind of get your thumb on autopilot. Even though your thumb is on autopilot, it's always going to be playing kind of the, you know, on the beat, right? The one and the two, you know, or on the one, two, three, four. Right? But not beats in between. But you can, remember we said how you can, you know, you can change whether you're playing the root or the third or the fifth. Okay? So, that's one kind of element of all this. And then, we talked about how, with the other fingers, you can either play on the beat, like this. That's playing on the beat or you can syncopated, which is off the beat. The thumb hasn't changed. And notice how you can change the sequence of these notes and it sounds different. So now I can go, same notes, just kind of a different pattern. Oops. Right? So, I'm playing same notes, just in different ways. And, to me, that's really the key of learning how to become a good fingerpicker, is to really just become comfortable and fluent in doing things in a lot of different ways. Because in the next step, is to learn how to combine them. Okay, so, rather than saying, alright, well, okay, my thumb's going to be doing, you know, root fifth, or root, third, fifth exclusively, or I'm going to playing on the beat or syncopated, exclusively with the hand, just mix it all up. Okay? So, now I'm still just going to hold a C chord on my right hand, but I'm just going to start kind of free form creatively combining all of these elements that we've been talking about already with the right hand. So, that might seem a little complicated, but it's really not. All I'm, all I'm, you know, all I'm doing is sometimes I'm playing on the beat with the other three fingers and sometimes I'm playing off the beat, syncopated. And, you know, I've practiced enough where, you know, it just sort of becomes second nature after a while to know that your thumb is kind of just doing this bass line. And your other fingers can play on the beat sometimes or syncopated and just kind of learn how to combine things in different ways. Again, I'm not changing my left hand at all. So."