The guitar takes suggestions from both hands to make a full sound. You will increase your flexibility and skill as you learn both right hand and left handed techniques.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 the holy grail of acoustic guitar playing.

Finger picking is usually described as playing the guitar with only your fingers, not with a pick. Fingerpicking allows the guitarist to play difficultparts by using multiple fingers at once to play.

Fingerpicking with an alternating bass is another type of playing with your fingers only. 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. Even if you think you will not ever play classical music you should study a little for the techniques you will learn.

Using your right hand to muffle or mute the sound of the guitar is called dampening.

Techniques For The Left Hand

Barre chords are played by using the index finger of your left hand to hold down all of the strings at once. Mastery of the barre chord is required of all guitar players.

Many musicians use the arpeggio to guide then through their
solos. Arpeggio is both a technique and a knowledge of theory.

Dampening is a technique that can be used by either hand and involves muting the strings just slightly to produce a muffled, percussive sound.

The hammer-on refers to using the left hand to sound the notes by forcefully pressing on the strings without the help of the right hand picking the string.

A pull-off is the opposite of a hammer-on. Try playing a portion of music with only using hammer-ons and pull-offs, the beginnings of an effective improvisation.