Blues rock guitarist Jared James Nichols has established himself as a high-energy pick-less guitarist. Wielding a variety of P-90-loaded Les Pauls, Nichols has developed an intriguing technique that enables him to achieve the same kind of attack he would get with a pick – albeit with an added, distinctive flair.
Speaking about how he developed his fingerstyle technique in the first place, the blues player tells Guitar World that being left-handed led him to approach the guitar in a slightly unconventional way. “Now, I don't mean I hold the guitar like a lefty where I would flip it. It's that everything I do in life is with my left hand,” he clarifies.
“When I picked up a guitar, I held it righty, but the pick never felt right in my hands, so I started to make up my own technique for how to play, which was essentially very simple.”
In his early days, he would use his thumb as a downstroke, while his index, middle, and ring fingers functioned as upstrokes. After discovering Albert King, Derek Trucks, and Mark Knopfler, he decided to take a page from their playbook and hone his own version of the fingerstyle technique.
“I'm [now] using my thumb as a down, pulling up with my index finger as well as my middle finger. Now playing that slowly, you can hear I'm sliding into that and I'm snapping up on the string. It gives it a percussive attack,” he explains while playing a blues riff in the key of G.
“There's a lot of snapping going up. It's almost as if my string is hitting the frets. And that gives me a certain tone that has a little bit more of, not only a shimmer, but a snap and a sparkle to it that I really like for sitting out of the mix."
Nichols also mentions how his technique allows him to pay more attention to dynamics. Essentially, the harder he snaps, the louder the volume.
“As hard as I pick with my fingers, I can feel all the notes underneath my fingers; it’s almost all about the pressure,” he says. In addition to dynamics, his fingerstyle technique enables him to manipulate tone depending on whether he plays more toward the bridge or the neck.
“So for instance, if I go near the bridge more and I get [plays the riff] more towards the neck, as you can tell by the bridge, it gets a little bit more bright. It gets a little more snappy. And as I move up the neck towards the frets, it starts to get a little bit warmer. So that's one of the big things using my fingers that I do.”
To further bolster his tone, Nichols recently teamed up with Blackstar on a new signature guitar amp head and corresponding plugin.
