Fingering Techniques

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How to Play Folk Guitar Fingerpicking Style

If you're playing folk music on your guitar, you'll probably want to put down the pick and use a fingerpicking style. This video gives you ideas and instruction on playing folk guitar with just your fingers [more…]

The Ups and Downs of Strumming a Guitar

One of the most basic ways you can play chords is with a strum. Strumming the guitar is the simple act of brushing the strings with a pick, thumb, or the back of your fingernails. A strum can be slow, [more…]

How to Use Left-Hand Muting to Create a Crisp Guitar Rhythm

When it comes to rhythm guitar, you need to learn how to stop the strings. Just listen to blues rhythm guitar and you'll hear that it’s not one repetitive wall of sound, but an open, varied sound with [more…]

How to Play Double-Stops on the Guitar

Guitarists begin by learning how to play only single-string melodies. Learning how to play double-stops on the guitar lets you use the whole neck to express your musical ideas. In fact, playing double-stops [more…]

How to Play Guitar in Position

Playing in position means that your left hand remains in a fixed location on the neck of the guitar, with each finger more or less on permanent assignment to a specific fret, and that you fret every note [more…]

How to Smoothly Shift Guitar Positions

Guitar music isn’t so simple that you can play it all in one position, and life would be pretty static if you could. In real-world situations, you must often play an uninterrupted passage that takes you [more…]

How to Position Your Right Hand for Fingerpicking Your Guitar

If you eschew such paraphernalia as picks and want to go au naturel with your right hand, you should try finger-style playing, or fingerpicking. Fingerpicking [more…]

How to Understand Left-Hand Fingering in Guitar Tablature

Understanding left-hand fingering in guitar tablature (or just tab) is not as hard as you might think. Most of the time, there won't be any notation in the tab to alert you to which fingers to use because [more…]

How to Play the Guitar Using Alternate Picking

Alternate picking is the right-hand picking technique that uses both downstrokes (toward the floor) and upstrokes (toward the ceiling). When you learn how to play the guitar using alternate picking, you [more…]