Fingerstyle Guitar: Can You Do It?

the triplets on Requiem for John Hurt are pretty tricky

Oh and Jesus is a Dying Bedmaker -- one of the best song titles ever

cheers. they mostly sound if not look well beyond my level but it's good to have goals.

not just good, necessary. if i don't have something to work towards i end up treading water or not even playing at all.

The easiest of them would be Orinda-Moraga -- the bend thing is a neat trick that's simple once you get it down

One of my all-time faves:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QLeqnEDF7jU

Can do it a bit but not very well, too lazy tbh, flatpickers of the world unite!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BqISqpMRo8

^^ James Taylor explains about nails

im starting to play rudimentary fingerstyle travis picking crabclaw whatever. i've just got the basic premise of it and i'm like too in love with this thing that i can make and just play with it all the time, not really progressing. i learnt like wildwood flower and then just played with the scale and chord combinations.

i think my housemates are pretty bored of this sound now

Learn this, it's easier than it sounds

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFAsoKHepRI

Plax, can you do "Blackbird" already?

no but lol i hate the beatles. this is ilx!

Boots of Spanish leather is a good starter song. Downside is it'll make you miserable

g-d i wish i could play guitar

I wish I could play a good fingerstyle, but instead I'm all:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f51QWBM7IME

Working on that Travis picking, though. I get discouraged easily. I think I listen to Will Ackerman and Leo Kottke and just expect to play like them after twenty minutes of practice.

Sometimes I tune to dadgad and I get 'choon or two going though:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOxJeoNFl3E

I have a steel strung and a nylon strung guitar. I find that practicing finger picking on the wider-necked nylon guitar makes chords a lot easier when I switch back to the steel string (almost to the point that I feel like I'm cheating).

I tune down to c# to make everything a bit easier, generally speaking. For some reason, things that need to be in standard tuning are just easier to fret with the capo at three; rather than just tuning up to E (maybe that's a mental thing though and I should get over it).

I was recently told to listen to John Hurt because even though what he's playing isn't that easy, it **SOUNDS** easy and is, therefore, easy to follow.

on top of the difference in tension, i imagine you're getting better action with the capo'd fret vs. the nut.

i've been trying to learn finger style stuff, but life's in the way of that most of the time. i can play most of a skip james song, and the first few parts of "angie" (jansch's version) but uhh that's really hard. i started with a hybrid style but cuz i can't keep track of picks it's turned into a thumb-and-fingers thing. somehow i imagined the solution to this was "buy fingerpicks".

I think the sound of fingerpicks is very nice, much nicer than bare finger/nail on steel strings. It's also loud though, and I mostly practice at night, so I stuff a shirt in my guitar and play bare-fingered.

the problem i have with fingerpicks is how clumsey i feel with them. i also have less control tonally with the picks vs my fingers (which fyi for me is the difference between none and very little). and then the volume thing. i can't play loudly with my fingers, but i'm convinced i should figure that out. i was fortunate enough to hear this guy play a guitar i built and i'm always shocked at how much volume and projection the dude gets with just his fingertips (uses a thumbpick tho, iirc):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rZiQGO1YfEc

have you played with different size/material picks and with bending the metal ones to fit better? I find they're less clumsy with a good fit. I also prefer the metal to the plastic, in part because you can shape them.

yep, i have metal ones. nice low friction cobalt things. i am just clumsey. almost feels like playing with gloves on--probably just a matter of me adjusting to them.

Was supposed to go to a Brazilian guitar seminar today but don't think I can make it. If you are a thrifty/needy nylon string guitar player in NYC I might could donate my spot to you.

You are a nylon-string player, JR&B?

I own a nylon string and have been trying to play for the past two years so I guess the answer is yes, sort of.

I wish I could play with my fingers on guitar more, really just be able to arpeggiate much better in general. I'm pretty decent at some alternate picking, but I haven't even gotten to the point on bass I play with my fingers much. I do pick out some chords pretty well with a pick with alternate picking.

I've been growing and strengthening the nails on my right hand for fingerpicking purposes, but I've found this is impeding my bass playing. Is it possible to do both?

Good question.

You could always glue on fake nails for your guitar gigs and take them off for your bass gigs but I imagine that would grow tiresome.

j/k

Have a good book to recommend to beginners, if anyone is interested.

yeah sure!

Fingerstyle Guitar From Scratch, by Bruce Emery.

I will check it out. I often practice from this. But as the reviews say, you learn from playing the songs with very little instruction.

(Xp) Or Travis-Style Guitar From Scratch, by the same author.

looks intersting, thx

i'm a lefty, play guitar righty, and find it easier to play fingerstyle than with a pick. i played piano for many years before picking up guitar, which may have helped.

Lefty too. Have had a lot of trouble taming right hand since I came over from bass and at some point was playing mostly one finger at slow-medium tempos. And no ring finger obv.

I'll keep that in mind for guitar students, thanks. What are its strengths iyo?

Strengths of being a lefty? For fingerstyle guitar? Not aware of any.

Ha, no argument there! What are the strengths of the Emery book?

Emery books strengths are

• Stresses the need to develop a strong, independent thumb that will keep good time no matter what the other fingers are doing above it

• Helps the learner do this by taking a half-dozen or so old, familiar out-of-copyright tunes and cycling through them gradually adding more and more syncopation to the mix

• has a jokey conversational style, but one that is genuinely engaging and informative, instead of off putting and digressive.

• no staff notation, only tab

• aimed at folk- and country-based popular music styles, no classical études

re: Being a lefty: one might think it would help the left-hand technique but I haven't found it so- still often feels like I am trying to jam some of the fingers into too small a space and stretch the others more than they want to go. Also losing the groove on the right hand is embarrassing, I mean discouraging or can be, bringing the whole thing to grinding halt. Right hand fingers tend to collapse, although my understanding is proper technique is to keep the shape of the finger and do the work from the top knuckle, or something like that. Best way I have found to train my right hand fingers is not to 'prepare' the string but actually to 'bounce' a little, like it was a trampoline.

Pro-tip: in Portuguese common way to refer to a lefty is "canhoto," which can also mean "devil."

One other thing: in those books he says to use your left thumb to fret certain bass notes, like an F. Obviously I've seen people do this and I've seen it recommended elsewhere, in the Arnie Berle book for instance, but I can't physically do it, so end up having to play the F barre, which is my least favorite barre chord.

Since I learned trying to play from an axis bold as love songbook, I use my thumb for practically everything. It often causes trouble for me when playing more complicated finger style stuff bc my other fingers are often not arched enough to produce clear ringing notes. I'd suggest toughing it out with developing a good 6 string barred technique.

I have no idea what kind of students you have, whether they are part of some program at your university or private

I teach guitar lessons privately, from home and at a private music school. I'm pretty much fine for resources to teach classical. (The Royal Conservatory makes that pretty easy up here.) However, I can always use more resources for teaching non-classical students, i.e. the majority of guitar students. I mostly just use popular tunes to teach fingerpicking ("Landslide", "Dust in the Wind", "Freight Train", "Blackbird", etc); a good method book would be very useful.

I found this some time ago: http://www.chapters.indigo.ca/books/product/9781423487432-item.html?s_campaign=goo-PLATest&gclid=CMOOy9Tj9L0CFa5DMgodhj8Akw

It's for intermediate-level players but it's not bad at all, especially for its price.

No classical player frets notes with his or her thumb btw, except maybe as a special technique for some modern piece. I think you're fine without doing this.

I also use some of the Giuliani exercises just to build fingerpicking technique even for non-classical players.

Thanks. The two Amazon reviewers hated that Blues book but I'll take your word. Looked at the Giuliani book-one guy said get Pumping Nylon instead but hate both the title and the cover.

Not fingerstyle but this guy has some good stuff for jazz guitar. Plus he's Canadian. http://www.mattwarnockguitar.com/beginners-guide-to-jazz-guitar
http://www.mattwarnockguitar.com/category/front-page

https://youtu.be/7n5Rdt8cOQk

Which songs would you recommend learning as a progression to get to:
https://tommyemmanuel.files.wordpress.com/2008/12/chet-atkins-walk-dont-run2.pdf

Do you play any bass + melody stuff already? Can you play "Freight Train" (whether upside down, right side up, with or without thumb fretting, etc)?

i used to be able to do a mean Dust in the Wind

Silent Lucidity or gtfo

Been playing since the 80s and I still can't cleanly play a bar 7th chord on the A string or a bar minor chord on the E string worth a chud. I just cannot get that note on the bar between the fretted notes clean.

I'm not ready for 'the claw' or anything, but I can get the picking hand down some now. I can't keep callouses on my picking hand, which is the reason I never got away from playing bass with a pick.

Albert King and Doyle Bramhall II both also did/do the upside town strung guitar. I saw Bramhall up close at a small club in Lexington a few years ago and it was really wild to watch him play.

Since October, I've got my head around Travis picking, have learned* how to play Don't Think Twice and The Boxer and have been messing with some mental Nick Drake tunings - notably BEBEBE - and can do clumsy, ragged impressions of Northern Sky and The Fly.

*learned is always a fairly loose term; mostly I still play like an arthritic rhinoceros.

nice, Don't Think Twice was one of the first I learned and it's got some really pretty chord changes in it

Where's a good place to go from there, man alive?

it's got some really pretty chord changes in it
I love the 'walks' from the Am to F and D7.

Have you ever heard the John Fahey tune Orinda-Moraga? That's a nice one that sounds harder than it is, although the nuances can be tricky. Good intro to fingerpicking in open tuning as well. A lot less left hand action than Don't Think Twice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hHXJXx0-gA

I've been working up a version of Mississippi John Hurt's Let the Mermaids Flirt with me, maybe 75% based on his version but with a few of my own ideas mixed in.

https://www.instagram.com/p/CJmGWLJB3Nn/