There's a lot of talk about the use of three fingers with the
right (plucking) hand, here's an excercise that worked, and
still does for me.
I developed this by playing just the same old broken thirds
excercise, but played with three fingers rather than the usual
M-I pattern. The good thing about this is that you get to
practice two different patterns:
M-I-R ascending
R-I-M descending
you also get to work skipping/alternating strings rather than
doing the usual tripplet-like pattern on one string.
Since there's no way to add any kind of fingering reference
to the TAB with the line builder, or to upload a gif or jpg
attachment to the lesson, I'll try to give you some written
instructions on how to play this.
If you already played broken thirds on a major scale I don't
have to tell you the fretting hand fingering. Now, the
"problem" here is with the plucking hand. I already told you
that the ascending fingering pattern is Miiddle-Index-Ring
so it goes like this:
C on 3rd fret A string - Middle
E on 2nd fret D string - Index
D on 5th fret A string - Ring
F on 3rd fret D string - Middle... and so on
You should get to pluck C on the 5th fret of G string with your
Ring finger. When you get there DON'T stop or pluck it
again, keep going and start descending. All notes should be
played as 8ths.
When descending the only "strange" fingering until the
Ring-Index-Middle pattern is set, happens when you turn
around and play C (5th fret G string - Ring), B (4th fret G
string - Middle), G (5th fret D string - Ring). After that just
descend following the Ring-Index-Middle pattern.
It could take a while until you get used to it, but it's just a
matter of concentration. It's funny, but you'll notice that the
biggest effort is not really playing with the ring finger, but
avoiding the tendency to play with the traditional
two-fingered plucking technique.
I think that what helped and helps me a lot with this is that I
come from studying some classical guitar technique, which
makes plenty of use of the ring finger along with index and
middle when playing arpeggios, which are also played with
several fingering combinations.
Hope this helps, if so, It'd be good to get some
feedback from you guys.
Regards!
