Normally when you hold the guitar and you're playing, the guitar is in an almost upright position.
You're looking across the top, your left hand has got these wonderful dots unless you're a classical player.
They take those away because playing classical guitar should be harder and that's one of the ways they do it.
So this is the view that you are used to seeing except when you're trying to learn.
I've got to see where that first string is to get on the right one.
Oh, I need to look down here and see all these strings so that I know I'm picking the right one, ok.
That's ok right now but don't let it become a bad habit.
Once in a while, sit up straight and realize that your hand,
one of the things it has to get into it's muscle memory is where up and down, almost without looking is that fourth D string.
Alright, you need to find that and if you watch in slow motion what you'll see I just did.
I reached right up underneath there with my fingers on that E string and I know what that gap feels like.
If I had to dive in from out here and go right in, oh I hit it, I didn't expect to.
Usually that's hard to do without some kind of an anchor and we'll talk more about anchors here in a minute.
The difference between looking for where to strike
and knowing where to strike is when things are going to start to get comfortable for you down the road.
Don't be frustrated if you know for right now you have to look, ok.
Take your time, get it right and give this hand time to feel for you where that fourth string is.
Alright that will come with time.
We're only doing down strokes by the way, forget that thing that I just did.
Alright, down, not too hard allow that pick to flap a little bit, not enough to fall out of your hands but not a death grip.
Note, strum. Note, strum. Note, strum. Note, strum.
Alright, so what we're doing is bass note, strum, bass note, strum and actually right now we're only doing the root note as a bass
but even later we're going to fancy that up a little bit to make it even more interesting.
This is where you should stop and get to a level of comfort.
Your left hand already knows it's job, right?
You've got your chord shapes, those pictures in your mind, you've worked on the transitions
and hopefully with getting to be less and less eye contact you should start to feel those.
It's not perfect yet, I know that.
Don't panic but it should be coming along and today we're looking at the right hand, so work on that.
Do some repetitions of this.
One, two, three, four. One, two, three, four.
Alright, that's with a flat pick.
If you are a naked finger picker, you're probably using your thumb at this point.
Same applies, you're just getting that note with your thumb… Four.
If you have the thumb pick, right now all we're doing is treating this like a glorified flat pick.
Alright, you can do it loose like this or you can pinch it like the flat pick.
I'm just going to talk about that briefly because if you're going to follow me into the next phase
we're going to be going into finger picking and I will continue to use the thumb pick for that section.
Doing this job with the thumb pick, people have mixed results in.
Thumb picks tend to be compared to a flat pick.
I mean you can buy heavy gauge thick flat picks but most beginners start out with a medium thickness pick.
If you do that with a thumb pick it's almost like grabbing right off the shelf the heaviest gauge, thickest flat pick.
So when you pinch it over here, you've really got ahold of the hammer and you will have to ease up a little bit to make that work.
Actually if I were doing this,
if I were playing something that musically required that, my first response without thinking about it would be just do the thumb.
Anchor down here with these other fingers that helps accuracy, gets the job done
and my thumb all by itself is controlling the volume by rotating over at an angle.
To adjust, like we talked about before with the flat pick the angle of that pick has a lot to do with the volume and the attack.
Think of that with the thumb all by itself.
So what we just covered applies to all three styles. Naked, flat pick or a thumb pick.
Work on a bass note and a chord, keep thinking about what you're doing.
This is a root note with the same name of the chord we're playing and we're getting bass note and a strum.
One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two. Alright.
Take some time with that, think it through
and then get a little bit comfortable with that idea and now I'm going to add something else into the mix.
Again, talking about right hand and feel and what it does to a song.