The guitar player is faced with challenges from both right and left handed techniques. As you learn new techniques you will expand your repertoire and flexibility.These are the skills you need to know right know as a guitar player.
Right Hand Only Skills
Flat picking is the name of strumming the guitar with a plectrum or pick instead of your fingers to play. Flat picking is essential to a well rounded guitar player.
Finger picking is the styleof using your fingers only to play the guitar. Using all of your fingers allows you to play intricate melodies.
Alternating bass is another method of fingerpicking. Playing the alternating bass with your thumb, you play the melody with your index, ring and middle finger.
Classical style guitar is using all of your fingers and keeping your right away from the body of the guitar for best freedom of movement. Every guitar player should have a working knowledge of the techniques involved in classical guitar playing.
Using your right hand to muffle or mute the sound of the guitar is called dampening.
Using the Left Hand for Guitar
A barre chord is one in which you use your index finger of your left hand to hold down the strings all at once. Only after mastering the barre chord can you advance as a guitar player.
Playing with arpeggios is a great way to learn a bit about music theory and learning how to solo. The arpeggio is probably the most basic of music theory skills and a great way to build your
solos.
Dampening is a technique that can be used by either hand and involves muting the strings just slightly to produce a muffled, percussive sound.
A hammer-on is a left hand technique that refers to using only your left hand fingers to press down in a forceful method to sound the string.
Sounding the note by taking your left hand finger off the string is a pull-off. Combining hammer-ons and pull-offs makes for the beginnings of a good guitar solo.