Fingerpicking Exercise 4


This exercise focuses on articulation with your fret hand in coordination with fingerpicking.  This example comes from one of the fingerpicking greats, James Taylor.  James adds a fret hand slide and a fret hand hammer on while performing a syncopated style fingerpicking pattern.  This is the intro to "Something In The Way She Moves".  It's a simple riff that you can repeat over and over to work on smoothing out your fingerpicking while adding slides and hammer ons.

Practicing Tips

As you pick through this song really work on getting all of your strings to ring out, especially the open strings.  This can be tricky as you slide your fret hand from the 2nd fret to the 4th fret.  Really work on good left hand position so that as you slide you don't accidentally dampen other adjacent strings.  Also focus on the timing.  Players tend to speed up the first parts of the articulation notes (slides, hammer ons) and treat them as ghost notes.  Listen to the song or read the staff notation to get the correct timing and rhythms.

You may find the syncopated picking more challenging than standard arpeggio picking.  Focus on the picking pattern and practice it with just the open strings (no fret hand) to get comfortable with this style of fingerpicking.  James Taylor plays this with a capo on the 3rd fret.  You can play it that way too or just play it using standard tuning and no capo.  Either way this exercise will work your articulation and fingerpicking technique.

Something In The Way She Moves - James Taylor - Intro

Something In The Way She Moves - Intro

For the complete James Taylor tab for this song, learn it here:
Something In The Way She Moves by James Taylor