Fingerstyle Guitar: Can You Do It?

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/