Exercises to practice finger picking?

greenfrog

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I’ve just started learning finger picking, and it feels incredibly awkward and difficult right now.

I know with time and practice it will get better — are there any particular exercises or other things to practice that you’ve found helpful for this?
 
Aaron Keim has a beautifully handwritten book of etudes:




And here's Sam Muir's youtube series, as mentioned by @Nickie
 
I've also found the Ukulele Corner's 20 Practice Routines for Classical Ukulele has some great exercises, both left and right hands (and together!!). You can check out their blog post on Right-Hand Technique: Versatility (with videos). But yes, another +1 for Sam Muir's books and videos and Patreon page. She's brilliant.
 
Some good recommendations here.

You can work through them all and you will advance in your playing and musical knowledge.

It wont matter which one you start with, but just concentrate on one at a time. Go through the sometimes hard monotonous effort to do all the exercises in one book before you start another. Don't confuse yourself by jumping around he books or the video courses. Also just do what the teacher says in the book or video and if you have questions find a way to ask the teacher for the answers, don't splash your questions all over the internet unless its a last resort.

Also, there is value in working through several approaches. An illustrative example is the difference in presentation between the Keim's books and Sam Muir's books. The difference in presentation shows some underlying approaches to ukulele music. By working through both, one at a time, you will pick up a lot more than just learning finger picking, while you are learning finger picking.

I recommend buying a hard copy format of whatever you choose. If you get the PDF version, print it out on good archival paper and put it into a nice folder. The actual book is my personal choice, and I know how much they cost and the effort of getting them. You may not realise the value in getting the hard copy now until 2025 if you are starting today, but I think you will if you want to be a student of ukulele into the future.

And never forget why you are doing the lessons. At the start make a wishlist or play list of about 5 - 10 tunes you want to play on your ukulele. Over time, find the written music in the format of the music in the book you are using, TAB or Standard Notation and keep it in your wish piece folder. Every now and then when you are bored with the course, get out your wishlish folder and try to play the tunes from the written versions you have. That may be a good way to keep track of your progress and keep reminding you why you are doing the hard work of learning how to use the ukulele as a musical instrument. If you get a teacher instead of a book or video, talk to your teacher about your wish piece book.

Edited addition. Often the books and videos are based on a weekly lesson, so each piece or example or lesson is expected to take about a week, probably with 30 minutes effort each day and a 60 minute session once a week going over the work. So if the book or video set has 26 pieces, the teacher is expecting you to spend 26 weeks or 6 months to work through it. You will notice that the number of lessons can correspond to the school terms in the places where the teachers live, IE the lesson plans line up with the school terms. So if you buy a book today that has 12 progressive lessons, you may need to realise that you are starting a 12 week (at least) musical adventure if you are serious, not a 2 day flick through.

Thank you!!

Is either book written using tabs or something else that moves over easily from GCEA to baritone?

I’ve had some trouble with that with videos — I know enough chords now that I can play along with a GCEA video, but it means sometimes throwing random barre chords in in songs that are meant to be easy on the left hand to allow focus on the right.

Books sound kind of nice because they mean I can transpose everything down a 4th instead of changing the fingerings or using a capo to avoid it sounding “wrong” against a video - but it kind of depends on what’s in the book. I can use tabs and am starting to be able to mentally transpose common GCEA chord names, but transposing notes on a staff or a lot of note names would be harder.

Edit: Just found a review that complains about the Keim book spending the last ten pages on low G and baritones… that sounds promising!
 
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@greenfrog the Ukulele Corner book is in both standard & tab, and Sam Muir's books are also in standard & tab but hers are for reentrant tuning, so that might take a bit of work to figure out. I particularly appreciate the Ukulele Corner approach because it is progressive: it starts simple and builds on skills as you work through it, to some very advanced skills at the end (which I am nowhere near yet, I just looked for curiosity). They have some modified versions of Giuliani's 120 Right Hand Studies, so I looked that up and there's a tab download through Guitar Shed. You can probably use this for ukulele, too, with a bit of modification since we're two strings shy of a guitar.
 
Take a look at "20 Easy Fingerstyle Studies for Ukulele" by Rob MacKillop. Excellent explanations and example audio. The TABs are clear and straight forward. The songs were written by Rob and show the technique he is teaching.

I like his book better than Aaron Keim's. Mostly because the fake folksy handwritten style of Keim's is difficult for me to read easily. But that's just me.
 
Coming from a guitar fingerpicking and a Scruggs style 5-string banjo background, I find that practicing picking patterns and banjo rolls are very helpful in fingerpicking in general. Research forward rolls, backward rolls, alternating rolls, and forward/reverse rolls. Practicing these rolls will improve your speed and accuracy with arpeggios, which are great for accompaniment.
 
UkuleleUnderground.com also has finger picking tutorials and exercises, of course.

Thank you for mentioning that!!!

Just had another look and there's a LOT more UU courses than I realized. Early on I found this page and thought those four courses were "the UU Courses" and never found the other section where there's all of this.

It looks like there might be some links malfunctioning - if you click "Courses" in the top menu and "Beginner Courses" it takes you straight to the subscription/login page without letting you see what the courses are. But if you click "Intermediate Courses" or "Advanced Courses" then you get through to the page where you can see a listing of what's in the video library before you sign up (and from there you can broaden the search to show all courses and also see the beginner courses). Same thing with the links at the bottom of the page "Beginner Ukulele Lessons" takes you straight to the subscription/login page, but intermediate or advanced takes you to the page where you can see the listing of that section in the video library.

I've probably only ever clicked "Beginner" in the past, and therefore never seen the listing of what's in the library and assumed it was the four courses I could see in the Shop section. All the references here in the forum to UU courses suddenly make a lot more sense now that I can see how many there are!!

Edit: I've used the customer support page to let them know about the malfunctioning links. Until the links are fixed, other beginners can go here to see the full listing of UU Courses, with the beginner section at the top of the page.
 
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Coming from a guitar fingerpicking and a Scruggs style 5-string banjo background, I find that practicing picking patterns and banjo rolls are very helpful in fingerpicking in general. Research forward rolls, backward rolls, alternating rolls, and forward/reverse rolls. Practicing these rolls will improve your speed and accuracy with arpeggios, which are great for accompaniment.
Jumpin’ Jim Beloff recommends the same finger roll patterns in “Fretboard Roadmaps”, a copy of which Ripock was kind enough to pass along to me.
 
Take a look at "20 Easy Fingerstyle Studies for Ukulele" by Rob MacKillop. Excellent explanations and example audio. The TABs are clear and straight forward. The songs were written by Rob and show the technique he is teaching.

I like his book better than Aaron Keim's. Mostly because the fake folksy handwritten style of Keim's is difficult for me to read easily. But that's just me.
Just an FYI on that MacKillop book - they're written for reentrant tuning. Not that it necessarily matters, but just to keep in mind.
 
If you are looking for exercises as opposed to complete songs, the book "Ukulele Aerobics" is good. https://www.halleonard.com/product/102162/ukulele-aerobics

The more I look at the previews for this book, the more I love it.

This is exactly the kind of thing I had to do when I first learned other instruments as a kid to build that note/finger/pitch mental connection that eventually makes an instrument feel like part of your body. I would love to feel that way on ukulele someday, if my adult brain can still learn like that. Finger-picking exercises are only 1/7th of the book, but the other 6/7ths are all stuff I want to learn too!

It has music on a staff with tabs underneath, and in the baritone version it's transposed an octave from concert pitch so you don't have 50% of the notes dangling below the bottom of the staff.

And it's not meant to be a time-consuming complete course, it's just "here's your daily bit of brain/finger torture before you go do other kinds of playing" to gradually build skills without sacrificing fun in the process.

Ordered it. Paper copy, because it's probably going to end up covered pencil (note to self: buy pencils). This book looks AMAZING...
 
If you are learning finger picking patterns, you can practice them almost anywhere by doing the pattern on your leg or the seat. It helps to fix the muscle memory of which finger moves in the pattern.

It takes me a long time to bed in a roll pattern.
 
finger picking has a broad definition that encompasses a large set of techniques. I use my fingers and something I find edifying are sequences: take a set of notes (like an extended arpeggio or a scale) and then play the notes of the sequence like this, 1,2,3 2,3,4, 3,4,5, 4,5,6, 5,6,7, 6,7,8. You're basically just playing three contiguous notes in the sequence but incrementing which three notes you play. I really helps with finger independence.
 
Hello! I run a series called #fingerstylefursday which is based around improving fingerstyle with nice sounding etudes - here’s #22 for example, I’m currently on #64 and they come out each week.

Tabs can be found for free on my Instagram @4stringboy, or just follow the lesson 😊
 
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