Chord Picking Patterns Made Easy – Learn Guitar Picking Patterns That You Can Use In Many Different Songs

Have you ever listened to a song with a guitar part that sounds very “busy” with a lot of notes sounding one right after the other and felt overwhelmed at the thought of trying to learn it yourself? I’m talking about songs like Kansas’ “Dust in the Wind,” Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” “Simple Man” by Lynyrd Skynyrd or the beginning part of “Fade to Black” by Metallica. These are all songs that are built around fairly simple fret hand chord shapes. The reason these songs sound both complex and cool lies in the picking hand—the pick hand plays a repeating series of notes over different chords to create a very cool effect. Chord picking is the tool that is used.

Today we are going to look at how these types of guitar picking patterns are created and how you can start to use them in your own playing right away. It’s easy once you know how.

Let’s start with a C chord shape with the fret hand:

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With our pick hand we are going to use a chord picking pattern that is eight notes long. Most guitar picking patterns are based on a repeating series of six or eight notes. There are exceptions, but we are going to focus on a simple eight note pattern so that you can get the concept down right away.

Place your fret hand in the C chord shape. With the pick hand, play the following eight notes:

They are all contained within that C chord shape, so once your hand is in the chord shape you can leave your fret hand fingers down—they do not need to be moved as you pick the notes. Leaving your fingers down also lets all the notes ring out together—this is important so that the chord picking pattern doesn’t sound “choppy.” The musical term for playing a chord one note at a time is “arpeggio.”

Now, let’s connect a series of C chords using our guitar picking patterns:

You want to create a steady, even stream of notes with your chord picking pattern. There should be no “pauses”—just one note right after the other. Guitar picking patterns do not need to be played at a fast tempo (although they are sometimes.) Slow and steady sounds great, too.

Now that you have the idea down, let’s add a second chord to our chord picking pattern. Let’s use the Am chord:

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You can combine the C chord and the Am chord in the chord picking series. Play the eight note series two times using the C chord and two times using the Am chord and switch back and forth:

Once again, create a steady flow of notes evenly spaced. You can end the chord picking pattern by strumming a C chord.

Make sure that your fret hand is able to smoothly change between the C chord and the Am chord. Smooth chord changes with the fret hand are very important for good sounding chord picking patterns. If the chord fingerings give you trouble, make sure to practice them by themselves until you can change between the chords without a break or a pause.

As you can see, it is quite easy to take very simple chord shapes and make them sound great. The repeating pattern with the pick hand played with the same way with each fret hand chord fingering means you only have to memorize one chord picking pattern in our example. Simple chord shapes combined with repeating guitar picking patterns are an excellent way to create guitar parts that sound much more difficult than they really are. Now you know the secret to chord picking!

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