All About Patterns & Styles of Fingerpicking

"So, once you learn how to kind of do these things fluently, how to separate your thumb from your other fingers. Play on the beat, play off the beat, you know, syncopation, non-syncopation, you'll find that you can really give a lot of different sounds without really having to change anything that the left hand is doing. So, here's some examples of that. I'm just going to hold an E chord and I'm just going to add this note, kind of right here. I mean, it doesn't matter what chord you do, but, if you want to practice this, you can try this. So here's what the chord sounds like strummed. Okay? And I'm not going to change anything with my left hand, I'm just going to leave it. I'm going to clamp that down and forget about it. So, but now, I'm going to say, okay, what have I learned? Isolate the thumb from the other fingers, you know, play on the beat, play syncopated. What are some different patterns and sounds you can get? Well, I can go through a few examples of this. So, here's one possibility. You could go. Okay? Now, without changing anything with the left hand, I can go. And, you know, you can combine them and now it gets really interesting. All that's with the right hand, left hand's not doing anything. It's just staying clamped on that chord, you know. And, I don't know, you could do other types of patterns, I mean, you know. It's really just sort of limited by your imagination. And so, that's kind of a fun way to practice, is just kind of clamp a chord down, or, you know, another way you can do it if your hand gets tired, right? I mean if I look at my fingers now there's these big sort of dents in them now because I've just been holding that chord and messing around. You know, one way to practice is just tune your guitar to an open G or open an E or an open chord, any one that you want and just give your left hand a rest. And then you could spend, you know, hours just with the right hand trying different kinds of patterns and that's actually a good way to kind of focus on what your right hand is doing."