There are many guitar lessons available on the internet for free. Acoustic guitar lessons often focus on fingering open chords or demonstrate strumming patterns but today I will focus on the right hand technique for acoustic guitar playing. The electric guitar player has a range of electronic effects to help him express his feelings and musical ideas but the acoustic guitar player has only his right hand.

So, departing from the focus of most free acoustic guitar lessons, we will look at a few ways of working with the right hand to allow it to become more expressive and to give you more control over your picking and strumming. First, I should mention something that if you are new to the acoustic guitar, you might not know about: if you try to play fast, you will almost certainly lose volume.

This loss of volume needs to be compensated for if you really feel that you need that extra bit of speed. To add volume to fast passages, you must add force to your picking or strumming. This does not necessarily mean that you need to tense your right arm. You could slow down your playing and focus on accuracy. You watch how you pick or strum and make sure that your playing is a series of movements that go from one to the other without hesitation and without having to close your eyes and hope you hit the right strings. If you feel any moments where your hand is unsure where to go, you need to look closely at how you are playing and at what point you are losing track of what you are doing.

The one thing I want to get across in this free acoustic guitar lesson is that crosspicking is an ideal way to give your right hand more confidence. You practice slowly, of course, until your hand and are able to move between strings without hesitation. Keep your wrist loose as you practice. This should be a rule except when you are playing a series of rapid up and down movements like fast strumming or a single string tremolo passage.

Crosspicking involves moving smoothly and rapidly between strings, so if you become proficient at this picking technique your playing style will become more adaptable and free of tension.

Before you go off looking for another free acoustic guitar lesson, remember that whether you are playing single note melodies or strumming chords, the beginner acoustic guitar player needs to listen for the telltale scraping that shows he is not holding the pick at the correct angle to the strings. Hold your pick at a right angle to the string so that it picks the string without scraping.