Hello all. 
Welcome to Vintage Club #30.
Richard will show you how to take Grade 1 songs and apply fingerstyle patterns. Learn to play familiar tunes with new textures and advancing techniques, adding depth and variety to your playing!
View the session here: https://youtube.com/live/gh5kM3JqP9E
Register for Clubs here: https://www.justinguitar.com/clubs
FREE Resources here: Vintage Club #30
This session continues our exploration of playing with fingerstyle. We will use and adapt some beginner songs from the JustinGuitar Grade 1 song lessons. The aim is to move from simple strumming to finger picking patterns. You ideally need some experience of fingerstyle playing. I hope to make most, or all, of this session accessible to all beginners and more advanced players alike.
Practice the following chord progressions with basic strumming.
1]
| A | A | E | E |
2]
| G | C | G | D |
| C | D | G | Em |
3]
| D | D | G | G |
| C | D | Am | Em |
| C | G | D | D |
This time next week I hope you will be joining me and getting your picking fingers tied up in knots!
Yes, looking forward to it.
Would love to attend these Richard but alas it will be the recording for me, 
Looking forward to yet another fun time packed full with more tools to play guitar with. Always a pleasure and fun learning experience. You plan these well, Richard.
Hi folks 
Preview document and a full presentation document are available in advance of the live event from this link.
I’m enjoying these Fingerstyle explorations. I will definitely need to view the recordings to slow down the playback as I was having difficulty keeping up.
Richard, in today’s lesson, 11/10/25, you had us finger picking along with the strumming, so every strum, either up or down, had a note finger picked to go with it. Is that what’s typically done, the preferred method? I would guess you wouldn’t want a guitar being strummed and a guitar being finger picked at the same time, with one guitar overshadowing or drowning out the other guitar. They should play more in unison and complement one another I would think. It may be another example though of, if it sounds good, it is good? Thanks again for the lesson today. I enjoyed it immensely, especially as a finger picking banjo player. I can see great value in adding finger picking the guitar to my tool bag.
Great Club, thank you so much Richard. I have found the session useful. I would like to explore more how to correlate strumming patterns with fingerstyle patterns. I also plan to try with a looper, to strumm a song and then do fingerpicking over it. It should be interesting
I am having a extremely busy year so my guitar as a learning path is a little bit on a side road lately. I still play songs, but I actually don’t do much lesions and sessions. That being said, I am extremely happy that I managed to follow through entire session yesterday without any real problems.
That is a really important point / question to raise Jim.
The short answer is no.
My main aim was to make beginner grade 1 songs (all three songs I chose are grade 1 in Justin’s song lessons) and directly lift what is a recognisable and familiar ‘strumming pattern’, think of it as a ‘rhythm pattern’ and play that pattern with some designated strings so it translated without alteration into a ‘fingerstyle pattern’.
That said, I didn’t really do that as described for Heroes because there is no single guitar part that has its distinctive, simple and familiar rhythm. Hence I superimposed my own rhythms in a way that I thought corresponded with the song and some of its recognisable motifs / riffs.
In general, a finger picked pattern matching playing to the exact same rhythm as a strumming pattern could blend, merge and disappear in a muddy tangle - as you suggest.
Separation of the two would make each one stand in its own right without competing. That can be rhythm and pitch also. Say one is played at a higher pitch, perhaps with a capo.
Take Heroes as a for instance (that you might turn into a loop).
Guitar 1 - finger picking (perhaps using the patterns as played in the live session)
Guitar 2 - muted all-down 8th power chords
Guitar 3 - playing the riff on a single string over the D-D-G-G section
Hi Bostjan, thanks for watching and your kind comments. I’m really happy to hear that you played along just fine.
Looping a simple rhythm and finger picking over the top is a great approach. See my reply to Jim just above for one suggestion.
Hi @Richard_close2u
Thank you for the club. I’d be happy to learn fingerstyle with a Xmas song, especially Silent Night or Jingle Bells.