Alternating Bass Fingerstyle Guitar Technique For Beginners

In this free video guitar lesson from Jamplay.com, Instructor Orville Johnson teaches the alternating bass style of picking for acoustic guitar, using a popular song called Railroad Bill.

As Orville points out in the video lesson below, the alternating bass technique is similar to the way someone plays piano. With piano, a pianist plays the bass line with one hand and the melody with the other. This is similar to what you will be doing with this technique and this song. The way you will do this is by playing the bass line with your thumb and use the rest of your fingers to finger the chord and play the melody.

This is a great introduction to the Alternating Bass Fingerstyle Technique. Orville takes things nice and slow so that any beginner can follow along.

The chords you will need to know for this lesson are C Major, E Major, F Major (Orville plays the F Major chord a bit different than you may be used to.  He hooks his thumb around and plays the first fret of the sixth string. He demonstrates how to do this in the video below) and G7.

Fingerstyle Guitar Lesson – Alternating Bass

A big thanks to the folks over at Jamplay for sharing this awesome video guitar lesson on Alternating Bass.

JamPlay is a membership only service which broadcasts high-definition video guitar lessons. They teach by “lesson set” instead of just flopping out a ton of small video clips. They start with the very basics like tuning your guitar, finger placement, and basic chords, and move on to finger-picking, palm muting, hammer ons, pull offs, and many more advanced topics as you progress through the lessons. When you have time, I highly recommend you check them out!  Click here to visit JamPlay.