Guide to Buying and Using a Thumb Pick
Below is an excellent video introduction guide that will teach you how to use a thumb pick for guitar.
A thumb pick is a kind of finger pick that attaches to your thumb obviously and is most commonly used with bluegrass style guitar playing. Most of the thumb picks you will find today are made of either plastic or metal. Thumb picks are unlike flat picks which are held between your finger and thumb.
In the following video lesson, Jim Deeming with Jamplay.com, will discuss some of the various brands and styles of thumb picks available to todays guitarists and more…
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. Read more
