Fresh off the announcement of his Marshall endorsement, Jared James Nichols is taking it back to his roots – and by that, we mean the very reason he decided to ditch the pick and play fingerstyle exclusively, in a journey that took him from rural Wisconsin to world stages.
“I remember the first guitar I picked up, I picked it up, and I wanted to play it like a lefty. The first real guitar I got, though, the guy at the store was ‘Dude, flip the guitar, you're holding it wrong,” he says in his new Gibson documentary, The Long Road: A Jared James Nichols Documentary.
“He was like, ‘If you want to be a real guitar player and play really good guitars, you got to play righty. They don't really make great left-handed guitars.’”
Nichols was 15 at the time, and while he quickly got used to his newly purchased right-handed guitar, one thing that felt unnatural to him was playing it with a pick.
“It was fucking me up,” he says matter-of-factly, “and I needed to feel the strings under my fingers. I started to play without a pick, and I distinctly remember people telling me, ‘Man, it's never gonna work, you're never gonna be a great guitar player without a pick.’”
Discovering “guys like Jeff Beck and Mark Knopfler and Derek Trucks,” was the epiphany that he needed to stick to his own unique brand of fingerstyle playing.
“I was like, ‘Well, they do it,’ and then I just started to kind of do it my own way. No one taught me how to do it. I just said I don’t care. I’m just gonna try and see what happens. And what ended up happening was, I started to develop my own sound and technique with it, and I’m so happy now that I did.”
In one of his Guitar World columns, Nichols broke down his one-of-a-kind fingerstyle technique and waxed lyrical about the players who inspired him.
“Fingerpicking felt like the most natural approach. I use my thumb for downstrokes and my first three fingers for upstrokes,” he wrote.
“There was one player in particular who inspired me the most in regard to playing fingerstyle, and that was blues legend Hubert Sumlin, who was known most notably for his work with Howlin’ Wolf.
“When I heard Hubert play, it changed the way I approached the guitar. Then I heard Albert King, Derek Trucks, and Mark Knopfler, all fingerpickers. All these players demonstrated the incredible range of sounds available when fingerpicking.”
