i Love Guitar

Fingerpicking training involves a number of very important types of technical exercises. One of these is Blocks. Asking your fingers to work in blocks [as a unit], helps you gain control of your motors, find your hand angles, & develop solid string notching. With picking & fingerpicking, we are searching for our picking pocket [where we know it's right - we can feel it].

Blocks

Use any chord, such as E Major, Em or C/G [6 string chords work best for these 2 exercises]. Open strings work as well [isolates motor hand].

To Do

1. In the first ‘measure’, we are plucking all of the fingers at the same time. Once you have selected a chord, repeat the 1st measure over & over. Stay on any of the string sets for as long as you like. You can also skip around.
2. In the 2nd, we are splitting the thumb away from the ima block & alternating them. Again, go in any order & stay on any string set for as long as needed.

You primary drivers are your main knuckles. For the fingers, this is the largest joint at the base of your finger, & for your thumb, it is the joint at your wrist. When you use these drivers, the fingers automatically rebound to wherever your arm allows them to end up. Stay as relaxed as possible & allow the fingers to return. Be sure also to follow through, even sometimes touching your fingers to your palm.

A figure is a short rhythmic or melodic device that has the potential for creating sequences. We also classify technical & fingering patterns as figures.

Melodic Sequence

A melodic sequence is taking a melodic figure & repeating it, at a new pitch level. It the following descending fingerstyle cross-stringing figure, the motor hand figure remains the same [p-m-i]. p = thumb, m = middle, i = index for a new string couplet.

Cross-stringing can describe a number of things. In this instance, we are using the term to describe strings ringing against one another. Let the open strings ring over the fretted tones [campanellas].

The thumb starts the figure, the m is always an open string, then the i picks up the last tone in the figure. Besides the open B string in the 2nd measure, this is the A minor pentatonic.

The bracket connecting these two lines of tab indicates that they are the same thing. We call the bottom tab line, pima tab. It’s motor hand finger labels on tab. Use those fingers on those strings for whatever is above [in the normal tab], just like with regular tab.

You can use any fret numbers, & we encourage you to do this. Once you get the feel of the motor hand [always moving the hand over the string sets - keep the relative position the same for whatever string set you are picking], experiment with changing the fretting tones, either within P5 [Position 5], or shifting to other positions. If you shift, you may consider using the Pentatonic frames in A minor for the fretted tones.