Alright here is a very short lesson on right hand technique and we'll talk more about this in a minute and later
but what I want you to see is what's going on down here position wise and posture wise.
In general my right hand is playing approximately over the sound hole and maybe just a little bit to the back of the sound hole right about in here.
Now that's not mandatory and you can certainly move around .
Here you get a different sound sort of a harp sound some people think.
Back here it's more twain more of a tenor sound comes out of there.
For starters you want to be about in the middle of that where there's a nice mellow even tone.
Now let's talk about how you're going to hit those strings.
This depends on where you want to end up.
There's no right or wrong here this is a function of what your goals are with playing the guitar.
If you want to do rock 'n' roll and maybe be a lead guitar player or play rhythm guitar you are probably going to use one of these.
It's called a flat pick and there are many different varieties and many different thicknesses
and for right now if you don't need to go into the deeper, debatable religion of what kind of pick you should use.
Just know that if you walk into a guitar store and say I need a medium thickness flat pick,
you are good to go for quite a while in the beginning of your guitar journey.
If you want to maybe play finger style then you've got a couple choices.
You can learn to play with no picks at all and this is what classical guitar players do.
Fundamentally the difference between a classical guitar player and the rest of us
is they would hold the guitar on this other knee and they play with no picks.
That puts their fingers at a very steep angle on the fret board and they tend to play over the straighter finger sweeping motion like this.
Maybe that's for you and maybe it's not.
If you want to play without a pick and on this side that's fine.
You are generally going to play in the same area over the strings and you can pick like most people who use one to three fingers and the thumb.
The pinky unfortunately is not much of a picker. The pinky's a bad picker but what it is good for later on is an anchor.
You'll see banjo players do this a lot.
You'll see me do this every once in a while on a banjo style roll.
It's an anchor point down there to keep your hand locked in for precise picking.
It's not so helpful when you're really wailing on a guitar but when you need to be anchored and playing accurately the pinky get's this job.
It rarely picks.
These three fingers and the thumb though do that job.
When you start out you are going to find that this may feel a little awkward.
Maybe you'll have a hard time getting a good sound out of your thumb.
You'll have to experiment with it and figure out what you like but typically on fingers what you'll find is that you want just a little bit of a fingernail
barely hanging over the round part of your finger.
Then you're almost hitting that string with a combination of skin and a little bit of nail.
The nail kind of reinforces the shape of the tip of your finger and helps you pluck.
Again, there is no right or wrong and there is not a lot of absolutes on this.
You will find guitar players like Tommy Emmanuel who play perfectly acceptable finger style guitar with no nails at all.
He has developed his calluses to the point to where he plays only with calluses on his hand and no nails.
A traditional classical guitar player typically strives to have a little bit of a nail head and that's what I do.
As for the thumb when you are picking with the thumb and no pick you're going to be using the fleshy part of the thumb
and unless you grow that nail out substantially you're not going to get a nail bite out of that normally.
What I find is that if you do grow the nail out long enough for that it's really hard to get the right striking angle unless you go classical.
That is part of the reason why they do left knee and point inwards because it gives a more consistent strike between the thumb and the fingers.
I don't do that. I use a thumb pick.
My favorite style is the one I've been playing along because it feels the most natural to me so the thumb now can lay parallel to the strings.
It lays down all the way.
My fingers are curled up in a claw position and then the thumb can play individual notes it can strum.
If I need to I can grab it and play it like a flat pick.
To me it's the most natural and the most versatile style but it may not be for everybody.
Some people put a thumb pick on and it just feels absolutely or uncomfortable and strange to them and they can't get used to it.
One more quick advantage is and this is not a finger style lesson
but there's something for you to think about in terms of setting your goal of where you want to end up.
You can not only play the thumb but it can do various jobs down here
but some of what you may have heard me do and some of the sample songs is you'll hear a real good muted bass.
There is only one way to get that and that's to have my palm laying down secretly here on the back of the strings
and doing what we call a "palm mute."
It's not killing the string completely it's letting it ring enough to make a tone but it takes away the sustain.
If I do that, that could get old in a hurry and it's just a ringing constant drum
but if you kill that just a little bit then you've got bass and rhythm both.
A little bit of a punchy sound and I just think it's cool.
That's my favorite style to play but you may pick something else and that's alright for the next several lessons.
Now we've got to get these two hands working together.
We've talked about what your left hand is doing and how to fret.
We've talked about the right hand basically is over here picking approximately in this area.
I think for purposes of demonstrating the rest of this I am going to go back to the flat pick.
What we are doing is going to be very simple either one note or simple chords.
So we've picked and for now let's focus on only a down stroke.
We will add to that quickly but for now we'll play down.
When you pick and when you dig into the string a little bit you'll have to get the feel of what works or not.
That will be a function of how thick your pick is, what shape it is and how heavy of a gauge of strings you're playing with.
You don't need to dig all the way down into where you are hitting the wood or pick guard.
Just enough to get a good firm hang of it and snap it off just a little bit.
This is something that we'll perfect over time with repetition and don't worry about it but listen to it.
Try to listen to when it sounds well and when it doesn't.
Notice a difference and experiment with it a little bit.
Before we can go much farther we need to cover one other topic because I hope right now you're holding a guitar in your lap
and some of the next stuff we're going to do we are going to do together and we need to be in tune.