Fingerstyle Guitar: Can You Do It?

I'm just kinda ambidextrous yet not nearly enough to really be able to just let it all come out smoothly and effortlessly.

I pretty much never thumb-fret, partly because I keep hearing that good form requires the thumb to be on the back of the neck, and that the overhanging thimb indicates sloppiness.

I do make exceptions for songs where there is a specific bass run on the low E, and the thumb is most convenient fingering, because reasons.

An example is "Driver 8." I think I have used my thumb for the bass notes of "Driver 8."

Specifically D with an F# in the bass

It is completely possible to play barre chords (xp or inversions) without ever thumb-fretting ftr.

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

Sund4r is correct that thumb-fretting is never a necessity. There are a few situations where it might makes l sense (for me, the D with F# in the bass a la Driver 8). But if pressed I could use a different fingering, no prob

Interesting. If Elizabeth Cotten is playing upside down à la Jimi Hendrix, then she is not thumbing her bass notes.

if a la Jimi Hendrix, she would have reversed the string order though

Oh right. In fact that is what it looks like she was doing.

Do people actually play fully upside down?

a left-handed high school friend exclusively played his epiphone SG fully upside down. it freaked me out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_musicians_who_play_left-handed#Left-handed_with_strings_backwards

from Dick Dale to Gruff Rhys

My brain can't do the mirroring properly so I couldn't see that Elizabeth Cotten was playing fully upside down.

Lol, I was going to say something rude to you but I'm happy we're now all on the same page.

From Sufjan's list: Laetitia_Sadier

I had no idea, and I'd seen guitar-era Stereolab more than a few times!

So it seems like she is playing the melody with the thumb, the bass with her index and then the thumb is also doing the comping.

yep, just a "simple" claw with anchor, but both fingers have 4-string range.

There's a pretty interesting music youtube guy called Benn Jordan who plays upside down guitar - he was given a right handed guitar as a left handed child and no-one ever intervened to let him know the strings were the wrong way round. By the time he found out it was too late to change. Watching him fingerpicking made my brain go a bit weird

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/