Right Hand Acoustic Guitar Flatpicking Techniques

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A foundation of flatpicking technique is freedom of movement. Your right hand should be able to move from soundhole to bridge to give you the biggest range of tones available on the acoustic guitar. The biggest obstacle to freedom of movement for your right hand is anchoring it by pressing down on the guitar body with your little finger.

Many guitar flatpickers anchor their little finger on the guitar body, and of course, after years of practice their playing sounds fine, but their ability to move their right hand is severely limited. This means if a flatpicker wants to move his right hand for tonal effect he needs to swivel it around while it is still touching the body of the guitar or lift the finger and plant it in a new position. Either method increases tension and the number of muscular operations the guitarist needs to carry out while playing.

Down strokes are more comfortable to do than up strokes. So some guitarists never even try to practice their acoustic guitar playing using the up stroke. If you think about it, it stands to reason that if you use a down stroke on the first string and then a down stroke on the fourth string, you need to stop the downward momentum of your hand on the first string, move the hand up to the fourth string, then start another downward movement.

It is much more relaxed and economical in terms of energy use to allow your down stroke to finish and naturally progress to an up stroke to strike your next string.

This video shows some basic flatpicking exercises and how to play them: