Way back in 2008 I put together a little YouTube tutorial video on the basics of fingerstyle guitar, with the tagline, “It’s all in the thumb”. For some reason, it took me this long to embed the video here in StringDancer. Guess I was busy doing something… don’t ask me what. 🤔
In the video I go into the essential elements of the alternating thumb pattern, which forms the very core of the Travis/Atkins style, and filters down into virtually every other permutation of fingerstyle guitar to one degree or another, from folk to blues, even to flamenco and classical.
Here’s an example of a basic alternating thumb pattern for guitar, in both standard music notation and tablature. Notice that the fretting hand is doing nothing here, you’re playing all open strings so you can focus your attention on getting the picking hand down (you’re basically playing an Em7 chord, BTW).
Play close attention to the letters between the notes and the tab, these are the picking hand markings, which use the traditional classical guitar indicators taken from Spanish:
p – thumb (pulgar)
i – index (indicio)
m – middle (medio)
a – ring (anular)
Focus now on just the bass strings in the tab version (the 4th, 5th, and 6th) for a moment. You will see how the thumb (p) alternates between the 6th and 4th strings: playing the 6th string on count 1, the 4th string on count 2, the 6th again on count 3, and the 4th again on count 4.,,, and then repeating this alternating pattern throughout the exercise.
If you’re just beginning fingerstyle, it’s a good idea to isolate and practice just those bass notes with your thumb for awhile, getting the feel of how the thumb swings from one string to the other. Later you can add the notes played with the index, middle and ring fingers to the pattern… but it’s important to keep that thumb moving smoothly from one string to the other, no matter what the fingers are doing.
Think of your thumb as the anchor holding everything together as you play. As you can see, the thumb is playing on every numbered beat (1…2…3…4…), so it’s functioning very much as a drummer would play the bass drum, keeping the time together and solid. And since the thumb is playing your bass tones as well, it functions very much as a bass player would in a band, again solidifying and defining the bass line of the piece.
Then begin thinking of the low notes you play on beats 1 and 3 as your downbeats, and the higher notes you play on beats 2 and 4 as the backbeats. This gets you thinking again of how a drummer plays a basic 4/4 groove, often verbalized as “boom – chuck – boom – chuck”.
As I go into on the video, once you get your thumb consistently playing your bass tones to the point where it begins to feel like the thumb is on auto-pilot, the fingers can jump in there and basically play as little or as much as you can manage, adding rhythmic and harmonic accents, melody, and counterpoint to what the thumb is doing. In many ways, what we call “fingerstyle guitar” would be more aptly described as “thumb-style guitar”, for it truly is the thumb that’s at the center of everything we do in the style, regardless of musical genre.
In closing, it’s worth mentioning that this very same alternating thumb pattern is part and parcel to playing 5-string banjo, which helps explain why the banjo usually comes quite easily to any guitarist adept at playing fingerstyle guitar.
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