Fingerpicking and Tapping Exercise in Dm [ WITH TAB ]

Hi everyone, here's a short exercise you can loop to really work on some more technical playing. This will really work on both your fingerpicking and tapping technique!
The whole exercise doesn't ever stray from the key of D minor but I'm creating a very harmonic sound by using close clusters of notes within the chord shapes and letting those notes ring out over each other.
You'll definitely want to take this slow and build up the muscle memory first before speeding it up - it took me quite a while to get this right!
If you've found this video useful please give it a like and subscribe! If you need any tips on how to play it just leave a comment and I'll be happy to help :)
dsguitaracademy.com

[@dfitz04]

I love it. Any recommendations on how to get started with fingerpicking and tapping?

[@daveshannonguitaracademy]

Thank you! Yes of course, happy to help 🙂 for finger picking the long term goal is to have true independence from what your (picking hand) thumb is doing compared to your other fingers - it's almost like the guitarist's equivalent of the left and right hand of a pianist, but just on your picking hand. Your thumb will normally be laying down a steady rhythm (think simple consistent quarter notes) and a good place to start is to try playing a higher string with your (probably index) finger at the same time as every other thumb note, so a pinching technique. The next stage is to try to put finger string plucks in-between the notes that your thumb is playing. When it comes to tapping, definitely start slow before trying to build up speed! Something to be very mindful of is when we're tapping notes we can get a lot of unwanted background resonance from other strings which can muddy the sound up a lot so we either have to carefully try to mute the unwanted strings with our fretting hand as best as we can or we can use a fret wrap/string dampener that wraps around the first fret to help dampen that I wanted string noise. This only works as long as we don't want any open strings in our tapping sequence!

[@dfitz04]

@@daveshannonguitaracademy thank you for the response and the tips. I look forward to learning this technique.

[@daveshannonguitaracademy]

You're welcome, good luck!