Learn Guitar Fingerstyle: A Beginners Guide To Fingerpicking

Welcome to the 3rd class in my series of guitar classes on Skillshare - this one presents a beginners guide to guitar fingerpicking. It’s suitable for the complete beginner and works up to an intermediate fingerstyle guitar level - on both acoustic and electric guitars.

Fingerpicking is a highly valuable technique to develop and will put you in great shape as you progress through your learning journey. This fingerstyle technique crosses many genres and enables a great level of diversity to your playing. It helps improve finger strength and independence - develops ability in both hands - creates access to a wider mix of musical styles and adds extra possibilities to your own creative expression.

We begin with simple picking patterns, which will progress to enabling you to tackle some well known songs. Along the way, we learn a range of fingerpicking techniques and I will encourage you to implement these in to your own composition, that will form part of the class project. I believe that encouraging a student to find their creative voice, is a great approach for further developing confidence and awareness of your own individual and unique musical output. I will also link you to guitar recording and music production software and mention some tips for these areas along the way. 

There are various chords used throughout, so if you are completely new to the guitar, you may also wish to checkout my first class: ‘Learn Guitar: The Complete Beginners Guide’. This class covers every essential topic you need to get up and running on the guitar and has a large emphasis on helping you to develop your own - unique - creative ability. 

** Want more!? - please check my other classes:

• Learn Guitar: Power & Bar Chords
• Guitar Practice: Improve Your Finger Strength, Stretch, Speed & Independence 
• Bass Guitar Lessons: The Complete Beginners Guide

Resources:  Lots of PDF’s are attached to this class, that contain the tab for each song that we work on - with some extra ones thrown in too. Check out the "Projects & Resources" tab to download them. I also provide documents explaining finger positions and other techniques we cover throughout the class.

I am available for any questions or comments you might have, so please feel free to email me or write in the classes discussion area. I login everyday and am always keen to help students wherever possible.

I wish you all the best with your guitar journey! 

Good luck! 

• Introduction
• Class Project
• Numbering & Positioning
• Acoustic & Electric Difference
• First Exercise
• Timing
• Moving Between Chords
• Fingerpicking Song: R.E.M.
• Fingerpicking Song: Radiohead
• Travis Picking
• Pinching
• Song: The Beatles - In My Life
• Strum & Pick
• Classical Introduction
• Conclusion
• Bonus Song - Dean Lewis