Tips for fingerpicking and building good habits. This week we focus on some ideas to help those who might be struggling with fingerpicking.
Holding a pick, strumming mechanics, and fretting chords vs single notes. A brief overview of techniques to consider.
In this lesson, I walk you through the basic techniques involved in slide guitar and the basic triads you can find for slide guitar in standard tuning. From there we discuss how to approach the weird tonality of slide guitar and dig into a few ways to practice, mainly using my SPJ Jam Tracks.
Share your slide guitar noodling in the community forum. Also check out the attached PDF, showing a set of Chords in C Major and a set of Chords in E Minor. These two sets should give you enough to be able to transpose to different keys, but let the community know if you need help transposing!
If you want more specific homework other than "explore and noodle," here it is:
1. Try to work through a few tracks on my SPJ Jam Tracks channel and:
a) transpose the whole set of slide chords to the correct key for each jam track
b) start simple by trying to play each note in the chord simultaneously on the 1st beat of each measure before trying to do anything too fancy
c) try to come up with a fingerpicking pattern you like for one or two jam tracks
d) See if there are options to play chords an octave higher or lower on the neck.
The goal is just to start getting comfortable with slide technique and to get used to the idea of finding chord tones that all reside on one fret together.
