Finger style playing – ‘Travis Picking’
This is a nice approach to picking the guitar using the fingers of your right hand to sound the strings (instaed of a pick, or your teeth) The general rule (more of a general practise than a rule), is to use your thumb to pick the 6, 5 & 4 strings then each of the treble strings has a finger each. Pick the 3rd string with your 1st finger (the finger nearest to your thumb) the 2nd string gets plucked by your 2nd finger and the 1st string (the string nearest to the floor) gets worked over by your 3rd finger. In classical guitar parlance your thumb is ‘p’, your 1st finger (index finger) is ‘i’ your 2nd finger (middle finger) is ‘m’ and your 3rd finger (ring finger) is ‘a’.
If you are familiar with the first few bars of the intro to ‘Nothing Else Matters’ then in ‘pima’ terms this would be … p i m a m i p i m a m i
