Fingerpicking Guitar Technique: How to Play with Your Fingers Instead of a Pick

Fingerpicking is a guitar technique where you play, hit or pluck the strings directly with your fingers, sometimes combined with a pick. This fingerpicking guitar technique is completely different from standard flatpicking and is used in almost every style of music on both acoustic and electric guitar.

Below you’ll find the most common fingerpicking guitar approaches: playing with the fingertips, combining pick and fingers (hybrid picking), using the fingernails (nail picking), and playing with finger and thumb picks.

Fingerpicking – Play Strings with the Fingertips

Fingerpicking, as the name suggests, means plucking the strings with your fingers instead of using a guitar pick. This fingerstyle guitar technique creates a more acoustic, natural and often “classical” sound, and gives you very precise control over dynamics and tone.

Because you can assign different fingers to bass notes, chords, arpeggios and melody lines, fingerpicking makes it much easier to play independent parts at the same time – for example a moving bass with a chord pattern and a clear top melody. A great example of modern fingerstyle guitar is Jacques Stotzem. Fingerpicking is used in almost every style, but is especially effective in ballads, folk, acoustic and classical guitar music. When you play with the fingertips (not the nails), the sound is softer and warmer than when you play with a pick or with the fingernails.

Hybrid Picking – Guitar Pick and Fingers Combined

Hybrid picking is a guitar technique where you use a guitar pick together with one, two or three fingers of your picking hand. This hybrid picking guitar technique is extremely versatile: you can switch instantly from strumming chords with the guitar pick to playing single notes and arpeggios with pick and fingers.

Compared to pure fingerpicking guitar technique you usually have one less finger available, but you gain the attack and precision of a guitar pick plus the flexibility of your fingers. Hybrid picking works on every type of guitar – electric, steel-string acoustic and classical (nylon) – and is also widely used on other stringed instruments such as bass, mandolin, banjo and ukulele.

Nail Picking – Playing Guitar with Fingernails

A typical fingerstyle guitar technique among classical guitarists is playing the strings with the fingernails. This “nail picking” method produces a clearer, brighter and more defined sound than playing with the fingertips, and the tone comes very close to the sound of a guitar pick. Because the nails are thin and rigid like a pick, they allow for very precise control over attack and articulation.

The downside is maintenance: you need to grow and protect the fingernails of your picking hand so they don’t break. Nail picking is most often used on classical guitar with nylon strings, because steel strings on an acoustic guitar can wear down the nails much faster. Many classical players file their nails into a specific shape so they behave more like a guitar pick or finger pick. If a nail breaks, professional guitarists often use superglue or nail repair products as a temporary fix.

Finger and Thumb Picks

An alternative to playing with the fingernails is using finger picks and a thumb pick, which you wear on top of the fingertips. Some players only use a thumb pick together with the other bare fingertips – a kind of hybrid picking without a normal guitar pick.

Finger and thumb picks are usually made from plastic (often nylon or celluloid) or metal. Plastic finger picks produce a softer, warmer sound similar to natural fingernails, while metal finger picks sound louder, brighter and more aggressive. The main disadvantage compared to playing fingerstyle with bare fingers is the loss of direct contact with the strings – you feel less of the guitar because there is always a piece of material between your fingers and the string.

Finger picks are not very common in mainstream pop and rock guitar, but they are standard in bluegrass, country, folk and traditional styles. They are also widely used on other stringed instruments such as Hawaiian guitar, lap steel, pedal steel, dobro and banjo.

Indication of the Fingers in Notation and TAB

For guitar notation and TAB, the fingers of the left and right hand are indicated with letters and numbers. For the right hand you’ll often see the classic Spanish names – pulgar, índice, medio, anular – but more and more modern guitar methods use the English names instead.

Because the left hand is almost always written with English letters and numbers (T for thumb, 1–4 for the fingers), you’ll now often see the same logic applied to the right hand on the internet.

Left hand (English indications)

T = Thumb
1 = Index finger
2 = Middle finger
3 = Ring finger
4 = Pinky

Right hand (Spanish indications – often used in classical guitar)

P = Pulgar (thumb)
I = Indice (index finger)
M = Medio (middle finger)
A = Anular (ring finger)

Right hand (English indications – common in modern fingerpicking / TAB)

T = Thumb
I = Index finger
M = Middle finger
R = Ring finger

Fingerpicking Score & TAB Example

Below you see a simple fingerpicking guitar pattern on a C chord written in standard notation and guitar TAB with English right-hand finger names. In the left staff the pattern is played with three fingers, in the right staff with four fingers. Which version you choose is personal and depends on your fingerpicking control and the tempo of the song.

Below is the same C-chord fingerpicking pattern, but now written with the classic Spanish PIMA indications for the right hand.

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