The following lessons deal with the development of right hand picking technique that will work for accompaniment in the standard American folk music repertoire.
This exercise uses a progression of partial chords in the key of E moving up the neck to allow practice of right hand picking patterns.
Only one pattern is shown – p-i-m-a, with the thumb moving between bass strings. Many patterns are possible: p-a-m-i, p-a-m-i-m-a, p-i-m-a-m-i, etc.
This pattern is designed to drill the fingers and thumb of the right hand to accurately hit individual strings. It won’t necessarily work as an accompaniment pattern for a song.
This pattern will work as a song accompaniment in 4/4 time.
This song is in 6/8 time, which requires a different accompaniment picking pattern as compared to a song in 4/4.
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This is a good song to begin adding melody notes to an accompaniment picking pattern.
Once a picking pattern with melody is learned well, the next step is to add melodic embellishment and variation. Insure that the thumb keeps a steady beat.
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This arrangement uses a basic picking pattern for accompaniment.
This arrangement incorporates the melody into the accompaniment.
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This twelve-bar blues progression in E is designed to develop independence between right hand thumb and fingers.
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Scales are valuable to know when learning a melody or figuring out a chord progression.