There are tons of books and articles on the topic of finger picking that have been written in regards to ukulele finger picking. The reason I’m not going to do an in depth discussion on this topic would be because this article is about the fretboard and fingers, and finger picking is more of a guitar playing technique than a finger picking technique. If you’re already learning finger picking, you should already have a good understanding of how to play finger picking in a natural way (without the use of a pick).

With that being said, lets start off with some basics. What are the common finger pick positions?

In the photos taken above, you can see that there are a few different finger pick positions. Most of the time, finger picking is performed by simply moving your fingers over the frets and picking a single note. The photos above would probably look more like this if not for there being a single white string hanging on the fretboard at the beginning of one of the photos. I’m not sure why this is, but I like the way this guitar looks with that.

There are two ways to position finger picking:

Playing along

Playing at your natural picking point

Where do you position finger picking when you play along?

When you sit on the fretboard, you usually go first at your natural picking point. So to play along at that spot, you would first take your thumb and pointer finger and play along with it. This works really well if you like to play along to your guitar.

What would be a more natural way to finger pick?

Most finger picking techniques can be broken down into one of two categories, finger playing on a fretboard, or finger playing over the fretboard.

Playing fingers off the fretboard

Most finger picking techniques are played over the fretboard, with your fingers being placed over the frets. This way of playing isn’t as natural as finger picking over the fretboard where you are trying to move your fingers to make up for missing the fretboard frets.

If you’ve never played a fretboard before then fretting the frets is probably the first time you’ll start fingerpicking while on the fretboard. Before you can learn fingerpicking, you’ll need to have some solid fretboard technique down.

How do I finger pick with the fretboard?

When you’re playing on the fretboard, there are generally 2 different finger positions you should use.

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