huntersmith14:
When picking a chord do you play every bass note in the chord or just the root note? Like on the E chord you would are usually hitting the notes on the second and third strings in the second fret. Do you not play these using this pattern and just pluck the the low E string with your thumb?
Not sure what you mean by “every bass note in the chord.” There’s only one root. That being said, the importance of the notes depends a bit on your situation. The root is generally the most important, generally followed by the 3rd, then the 5th (for an E chord, E is the root, G# is the 3rd, and B is the 5th).
However, if you are playing with a bass player who is already covering the root, the need to play the root is lessened considerably. And for many rock/pop songs, the 5th is often more important than the 3rd for chords where your ear can tell by context of the previous chords whether this chord is supposed to be major/minor. For jazz (or blues sometimes), the 7th or even 9th might become more important than the 5th, depending on the chord and the context within the song. Perhaps more than even the root if you have a bass player, meaning the 3rd and 7th are often the two most important notes. But sometimes this is so even without a bass player in an extremely traditional non-jazzy song, as you can see in the 2nd-to last note in “Happy Birthday” that’s coming up soon in this module).
Anyway, this might be getting ahead of what you meant. The way Justin suggests you start is to have your thumb and 3 picking fingers on strings that are all next to each other with your thumb on the root. So, for the E chord, you’d play the low E string with your thumb, the 2nd fret B with your pointer finger, 3rd fret E with your middle finger, and 4th fret G# with your ring finger (with pinky optionally anchoring on the body).
Once you’ve gotten comfortable with playing that, you can look into deciding what notes to play and what notes to skip. For example, notice that the 3rd fret E is redundant with the E on the thumb, so you could skip over that. Of course, if you do, that means your ring finger is playing a B that’s redundant with the lower B.
What to do? Well, as Justin often suggests, the best way to figure out what notes you should skip is to use your ears. Me, I think the best sounding ways to play it are 1) with the lowest 4 strings as above, and 2) with the thumb on the E and the other fingers on the three thinnest strings. But what you like best might be different.
. If nobody writes, I will just give it a try and buy a finger nails kit on Amazon. And we’ll see. Have a good day everybody ! 
