Beginner Right Hand Patterns To Get You Started

These beginner right hand patterns will get you started with right hand control. Have you watched someone watch a guitarist play? Most of the time, they're looking at the left hand. In reality, with fingerstyle guitar, the right hand is just as important. A lot of the time the guitarist is playing simple chords. It's the notes being played that are in the chords that matter.

One of the hardest things for beginning fingerstyle guitarists is to learn to control the right hand fingers. These beginning right hand patterns will help. We use patterns to develop control of our fingers. With practice, it becomes more of an automatic response.

It's like an athelete practicing. An athlete will practice a drill to develop a particular set of skills. At game time those skills have been developed to the point where they're an automatic response.

Where Do I Put My Fingers?

We're going to be using our thumb and 3 fingers. Your thumb will play strings 6, 5, and 4. Your 1st finger will play string 3. The 2nd finger will play string 2 and the 3rd finger will play string 1.

The finger motion starts where the finger meets the palm. The finger moves across the string from the floor side toward your chin.Don't pull the string away from the body of the guitar. This would make a snapping sound. That's a cool sound, but it's not the one that we're after.

The thumb should push through the string in the direction of the floor. Don't use a thumbpick as you're first learning these exercises. You need to learn what it physically feels like when you're playing each string. At this point, using thumbpicks or fingerpicks will just be another problem to sort out.

Here are the beginner right hand patterns that you should work on.

Right Hand Exercises Right Hand Exercises 3 and 4 Right Hand Exercises 5

There are more exercises on the Right Hand Exercises page.

Wait until you can play the first 5 exercises smoothly before starting on the more advanced ones. The beginner right hand patterns are the base that the other exercises are built on. You want to be sure that your fingers are doing what you want them to do before giving the thumb more work to do.

Remember that these beginner right hand patterns are just the first step on the road to good right hand control. Get these down and you'll playing songs in no time!

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