Elliott Smith's Right Hand Technique, Sometimes

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...in which I try to scratch the surface of the elusive half-strumming/half-fingerpicking technique that pervades so many of Elliott's songs allowing them to inhabit this tricky world of, "wait, is that one or two guitars playing?", etc.

By no means a tutorial, this video is just an attempt to replicate the tricky thing myself and maybe provide help for other people having trouble figuring out the technique. It's definitely not perfect but I think it's a good starting place.

The song snippets in order are, "You Make It Seem Like Nothing", "Roman Candle", "New Disaster" and "No Name #3". I chose these simply because they're all in the same tuning - both E's tuned down a whole step.

The basic technique as far as I can tell is having the thumb play alternating bass notes on the downbeats, usually root and fifth or root and third while having the fleshy part of the index either a) upstrumming or b) fingerpicking on the upbeats. The element that makes this more exciting is the floppiness of the thumb. Its power comes from the wrist and not the thumb joint as it would if you were simply fingerpicking. Elliott never used fingernails to strum or fingerpick as far as I can tell. This is the closest I've been able to get. If you have a better system or tips for how to get closer to replicating this style, I'd be honored to learn them.