IT’S ODD HOW MUCH EMPHASIS WE PUT
on the fretting hand as we work to improve
our guitar playing. Take a look at the lessons,
books, and instructional DVDs in your practice
area. I’ll bet most focus on scales,
arpeggios, and chord voicings, and consist
primarily of fretting-hand material. Even lessons
that explore style—as opposed to the
nuts and bolts of scales, intervals, and harmony—
typically concentrate on the fretboard.
It’s crucial to develop fretting-hand chops,
but hey, let’s not neglect the picking hand.
A limber fingerpicking technique adds sophistication
and drive to your playing, and often
gives your fretting hand a break.
 For instance, Ex. 1 shows how you can
shift melodic duties from the fretting hand
to its picking partner. This “harp tone”
approach has its roots in Renaissance lute
music and is a key element in the fingerstyle
wizardry of Lenny Breau, Chet Atkins, and
Jerry Reed. As you work through this twobar
phrase, let the open strings sustain and
provide sonic cover for the position shifts.
Repeat this example 20 or 30 times—think
of it as swimming laps—and you’ll begin to
hear hypnotic textures and overtones you
might have missed on the first few passes.
As you cycle through the passage, speed
up and slow down, taking note of where your
playing begins to fall apart. Push past those
boundaries, while striving to maintain a flowing, shimmering sound. Practicing in
slow motion is an excellent way to improve
hand-to-hand synchronization, and it can
be as challenging as playing fast.
 Ex. 2 opens with a salvo of harp tones and
then settles into pattern picking, an excellent
means of generating rhythmic momentum.
Again let the open strings create a ringing
backdrop as you descend stepwise along the
fourth string. Swim laps and enjoy the Beatles-
inspired harmony.
 We take pattern picking a step further
in Ex. 3, which evokes the jangly sounds first
heard in ’60s folk music. To grasp the rhythmic
structure of the core two-beat cycle
(found below G, D, and F in bars 1 and 2),
think “squeeze pick, stag-ger pick” and put
some extra
muscle behind
“squeeze.” In this example, “pick” always
falls on the open third string. Notice how
your middle finger alternates between the
second and first strings in this section.
Within the two-beat pattern that rolls
through the G, D, and F chords, the recurring
open G and E strings add striking color
to the shifting harmony. Describing the
resulting chords in explicit detail yields names
like G6, Dadd4add9, and Fmaj9. However,
when you’re crafting song accompaniment
that combines pattern picking and open
strings, it’s often more useful to focus on the
basic progression—as we’ve done here—and
simply think of the open strings as chimey
drones. Using this approach, you hit chord
tones on the downbeats and fill the upbeats
with open strings. Depending on where you
are in the progression, the open strings may
or may not belong to the chord, and this adds
appealing ambiguity to your sound.
 In Ex. 4, we add alternating bass to our
picking pattern. Here, the thumb swings like
a pendulum between strings four and five,
hitting octave A notes. This passage sounds
cosmic on a 12-string—give it a try.
PIMA
You’ll often see the letters p, i, m, ain guitar notation. These
are abbreviations for the Spanish words pulgar (thumb),
indicio (index), medio (middle), and anular (ring). To differentiate
between picking- and fretting-hand fingers in written music, classical
guitarists developed a two-tiered system: The numbers 1, 2, 3, 4 are reserved
for fretting fingers, while p, i, m, a indicate picking fingers. —AE
|