Now that you have some playing experience under your belt, we can move ahead to some more interesting playing styles. This chapter covers the basics of playing individual notes,rather than just strumming chords. To learn to play melodies, we have to learn more sophisticated right-hand playing techniques.This chapter introduces two of the more common styles of playing individual notes: the rest stroke and the free stroke. By learning these techniques, you will be able to play notes cleanly and easily, with a full sound. These techniques will lay the basis for all of your future playing, so we will break down their components so you can quickly understand and master
them.

Up to now, most of what we have covered could be played with a pick, but we will be studying arpeggios that are much easier to play with the fingers. For the single-note melodies that follow, a pick could be used, but now is a good moment to learn the principal stroke used for melody lines on the finger-style and classical guitar, known as the rest stroke.

The rest stroke is the technique that produces the fullest sound from a single note. It is played by plucking the string in such a way that, when the movement is completed, the fingertip comes to rest on the adjacent stringhence the name.