Plucking Chords Vs Plucking a Melody.
Fingerstyle Golden Rule
Hey guys, today I want to try to answer one of the questions I get asked the most on my YouTube channel.
So many of you get confused between plucking chords Vs plucking a melody and I totally understand why.
Fingerstyle guitar is a really challenging approach and at the beginning, it isn’t easy to figure out how to pluck the strings correctly.
Most of the time we try to teach our self how to pluck the strings and everything seems to be ok until we hit a plateau.
We’ve all experience this awful moment of being stuck in a guitar rot right?
There is a massive difference between plucking chords and plucking a melody and today I am going to show you my fingerstyle golden rule that helped me figure that out.
This is a fingerstyle guitar lesson for any guitar player who wants to finally learn how to pluck the strings correctly and switch between plucking chords and melodies easily.
However, there is no such thing as one rule!
The fingerstyle rule I am about to show you work 80% of the time. You will have to figure out the other 20% by yourself.
I hope this video will answer some of the questions you have about plucking chords and melodies.
If you have more questions, send me a FB message.
Good luck guys.
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Why Plucking Chords is Simple
I think that plucking chords are indeed the most simple fingerstyle approach for beginners. They have a bunch of positive aspects that make playing fingerstyle easy.
- Basic chords are very simple to memorize as opposed to memorizing a melody.
- Chords don’t “Move”. You could easily play around with a fingerstyle pattern over a static chord.
- It’s easy to spice up chords and still keep them pretty simple to play.
- Fingerstyle works perfectly with static chords as it make them sound better and more complex than what they actually are.
In this video, I am going to show you the fingerstyle golden rule over a very simple chord progression in E minor.
The chord progression goes like this: Am – C – D – Dsus
Notice that I actually start the chord progression with A minor rather than E minor.
Follow the video lesson to learn how to apply the golden rule over chords. I hope that once you learn this rule plucking chords will become an easy thing to do.
Fingerstyle Golden Rule on Chords
Pluck the bass notes with the thumb and always play the G string with the index, B string with the middle finger and the E string with the ring finger.
Plucking a Melody
The second part of the video will show you how to pluck a single note melody as well as chord melody.
I notice that a lot of guitar players get confused when they pluck single note as they don’t know which finger to use or, even worst, they end up playing everything with one finger.
I like to use alternate fingering when I play a single note melody. I use this rule 80% of the time.
Alternate fingering is probably the best approach you can possibly use when playing a single note melody.
There are a ton of different variations and plucking patterns that can be used as an alternative to alternate fingering but in this video, we will not cover them in this video.
Golden Rule when plucking a melody: Alternate fingering all the time and avoid plucking with the same finger.
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Useful Links
- Guitar Lessons in London
- Strumming Guitar Lessons – Justin Guitar
- plucking chords vs plucking a melody
- Electric Guitar Lesson]
