Finger Picking Drills and Exercises for Right Hand Coordination: A Helpful Tutorial

someone asked me if I had any finger picking tips um and so I thought I would show you an exercise that I found useful um for right hand coordination um it’s just like some finger picking drills I’m no guitar teacher but I’ve found this pretty helpful um so I’m just playing it on an E major chord you can play it on whatever chord you want and basically you just go um we’re just gonna go from like a thumb on the string on the lowest E string and then uh 2 three four on the top three strings I’ve got bad guitar terminology I think but it’s the first part of the exercise just goes 1 2 3 4 on the top strings and so I would set a metronome to like 60 or something quite slow and just go like and then when that feels really comfy and easy and relaxed and change the order to thumb 3 2 4 so thumb 3 2 4 thumb 3 and then from 4 3 2 and basically like any combination of those that you can think of every combination that you can think of is good until it feels really just kind of easy and comfy to go between those then you can jump them down a set of strings so then you got the 2 on the d string 3 on the G string and 4 on the B string and do the same thing and then mix it up and you could switch between those two sets of strings so and then mixing up the order oh my God oh my God I’m trying to like keep your hand feeling really relaxed a long time call me and then when that feels really comfy then you can get the thumb jumping happening and so I would just start by going like to a click grabbing just the first two strings slowly and then up to the third and I’ll do that for ages’cause I can’t takes a while for that to feel good um and then you can bring in the other fingers and then you kind of jumping the thumb but playing the top three strings and then you can mix up the order come on and then you can kind of also alternate between I can’t actually do that bit of a brain Bender for me um and so then you can also combine um you can go like thumb 2 and then 3 and 4 together and you can mix that up to different time signatures so reverse it and then you can kind of do ones that combine threes and two so and then so then if I make that in mind a chord that’s actually the the pattern that the Joan Baez diamonds and rust song users which is that pattern the whole way through and then the intro is kinda like I can’t see my left hand but I don’t know and that’s kind of that’s the basis of that song and like a lot of picking patterns use that anyway I hope that’s helpful I’m no guitar teacher but um yeah I’ve used that exercise a lot and you can also do it on pluck string like um to get the rhythm feeling really solid you can just ignore the left hand and go like which is less pretty but um good for rhythm anyway bye