“This is a technique that has been used to great effect by some of my biggest blues heroes”: By thumb-picking bass notes while playing a melody, you can be your own rhythm section – Jared James Nichols shows you how

A great way to accompany yourself while playing a melody on the guitar is to simultaneously play a repeating low bass note, usually on an open string, which can add rhythm and harmony to what you’re playing.

This is a technique that has been used to great effect by some of my biggest blues heroes – everyone from Lightnin’ Hopkins and Guitar Slim to players like John Fogerty, Lindsey Buckingham and Dan Auerbach.

With this technique, which many refer to as dead thumb, as it’s typically performed with the pick hand’s bare thumb and palm muting, which muffles, or deadens, the sound, you can almost sound like a one-person rhythm section.

As a fingerstyle player, it’s natural for me to use this technique to self-accompany licks.

To demonstrate, Figure 1 presents the vocal melody to my song Easy Come, Easy Go, which I play with a swing feel and repeating thumb-picked open low E notes.

I palm-mute the open low E string throughout, in order to produce a tight, thumping rhythm and prevent the bass notes from over-ringing and overpowering the melody.

Jared James Nichols: How to thumb-pick bass notes while playing a melody - YouTube

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I begin with a quarter-note pickup for my first open low E bass note then proceed to thumb-pick quarter notes through most of the 16-bar passage, which establishes a steady rhythmic pulse, as well as an E tonality.

While keeping the open low E bass notes going, I pick the melody on the higher strings with my first two fingers. The melodic line is based on the E minor pentatonic scale (E G, A, B, D), played primarily in 12th position.

In bars 1-3 and 5-7, the melodic phrases begin each time on beat 1, followed by the next note falling on the upbeat of beat 2. This creates a nice syncopation between the low-E quarter notes and the melody notes.

In bars 9-16, the melodic accents switch to quarter-note downbeats primarily, which changes the vibe of the line while also emphasizing the thumping quarter-note pulse.

Let’s look at some other ways to use dead thumb. Figure 2 is an eight-bar melodic line based on the E major pentatonic scale (E, F#, G#, B, C#). As with the previous example, I thumb-pick palm-muted quarter notes on my open low E string here and kick off the phrase with a pickup on beat 4.

The melody enters on beat 2 of bar 1. Again, try to maintain a steady quarter-note rhythm with the thumb while fingerpicking the melody notes.

Start out slowly and tap your foot as you play. The goal is to train your brain to isolate the two elements – the steady quarter-note bass line and the more rhythmically complex melodic figures – similar to the way a piano player uses two hands at once.

Figure 3 is an exercise that will help develop your dead thumb technique. Here, the thumb down-picks the open low E string in steady eighth notes while simpler, sustained melody notes are performed above the bass line on the higher strings.

Playing in a power trio, with bass and drums, I find that using low drone notes can help fill out the sound of my guitar parts while also adding to the heaviness of the overall sound.