If you are at all serious about becoming a great fingerpicking guitar player, there is one pattern in particular you MUST know. This pattern will give you the ability to play literally thousands of songs.
In today’s lesson I am going to reveal this fingerpicking pattern to you, and how to get it into your playing. Before I do that however, if you have never played this style before, then I highly recommend you check out an earlier lesson I created all about
how to correctly fingerpick your guitar
In doing so you will gain a much greater understanding of what it is I will be presenting to you in this lesson.
That said, the fingerpicking pattern I will show you today is sometimes referred to as travis picking. It is not travis picking, although it certainly does have elements of this style. Others call it the clawhammer pattern. Clawhammer refers to a banjo technique that is similar but not quite the same.
I really don’t care what you call it, it’s just a great fingerpicking pattern that you will use again and again and again in all sorts of ways throughout your guitar playing.
Literally thousands upon thousands of songs use this pattern including “The Boxer” by Simon And Garfunkel, “Landslide” by Fleetwood Mac and “Dust In The Wind” by Kansas.
For the sake of today’s lesson I will refer to to this pattern as the Clawhammer Fingerpicking Pattern.
How To Play The Clawhammer Fingerpicking Patte
The place to start with this fingerpicking pattern is the bass. This is because it consistently falls on the beat and is a very useful reference point for the other notes that you pluck to complete the pattern.
Your thumb will pluck the bass component to the clawhammer pattern throughout.
Let’s begin with a C open chord, and a typical bass approach you might use:
C Clawhammer Bass 1 Example
The above is what is sometimes referred to as a 5 4 5 4 bass pattern. This is in reference to the strings that are being plucked, and in what order they are being plucked.
Once you have the bass sorted, you simply add some higher strings of the chord in-between the bass notes on the offbeats. Here is one example of doing exactly that on the C open chord:
C Clawhammer Pattern 1 Example
There you go! You now have under your fingers one of the most commonly used fingerpicking patterns there is. Of course there are variations, but let’s concentrate on getting the basic pattern down first.
Notice in the example above, the bass is always on the beat, acting as the driving force behind the pattern, as well as a great reference point for the other notes our fingers are plucking on the higher strings.
Let’s now look at a slight variation that is often applied to the bass of the clawhammer fingerpicking pattern.
Here it is:
C Clawhammer Bass 2 Example
The above is known as a 5 4 6 4 bass pattern, again in reference to the strings being plucked and the order in which they are plucked. In this case we are adding the 3rd fretted note (G) on the 6th string to the bass of our C chord.
This brings a little more movement to our clawhammer fingerpicking pattern as you can hear in the example below:
C Clawhammer Pattern 2 Example
Whether you go with a 5 4 5 4 or 5 4 6 4 bass pattern doesn’t really matter in most cases. It’s up to you, however you may find one suits more than the other in certain situations.
Now you have the clawhammer fingerpicking pattern under your fingers, you can go to town applying it to any chord you like. While you may need to make some minor alterations to the pattern to suit the chord you are applying it to, it’s essentially the same.
Here is the clawhammer pattern applied to a G open chord:
G Clawhammer Pattern 1 Example
Because the root of our G chord is on the 6th string (the root for our C chord was on the 5th string), we need to apply a slightly different bass pattern. This is because we are wanting to always start the bass from the root note of the chord.
So for G we have a 6 4 6 4 bass pattern. Another possibility for the bass on our G chord would be a 6 4 5 4 pattern like so:
G Clawhammer Pattern 2 Example
In both examples above the remainder of the clawhammer pattern remains the same, only we have some different notes of course because we are fretting a different chord.
Applying The Clawhammer Fingerpicking Patte
The next step is to apply the clawhammer pattern to a chord progression. Before doing so however, be sure you have got the pattern down with isolated chords first, as demonstrated above.
Assuming you have, here now is one example of applying the clawhammer fingerpicking pattern to a progression:
Clawhammer Application Example
Learn the above example well, but don’t stop there. The key is always in application, so take this fingerpicking pattern you have learned today and apply it over and over again to all sorts of different chord progressions.
In doing so, you will truly master the pattern and develop the ability to effortlessly use it in your own guitar playing.
rnTake your skills to a much higher level with these
guitar fingerpicking patterns that are advanced sounding, yet easy to play