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as any listener to his latest album' The MYstery\Fa' first love: fingerstyle acoustic playing. The results have been awe-inspiring, pop, derivered with crystailine tone and impeccabre fork, and country of brend tastefur ;.."nue1s ;J;;#5;;ii,;;;. him for Best Country !nstrumental Perforyear;they nominated technique, certainly caught the attention of Grammy voters this and a Merle Travis classic that shows off both composltion original an of medley Rag," a Rag/Cannonball mance on "Gameshow melodv' the guitarist's fiendish speed and his knack for writing an unshakable
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Of course, it's one thing to think like a band and quite another to actually play like onHetting the fingers of your picking hand to work independently the way Emmanuel's do takes major time and practice. But You've got to start somewhere, and it's always best to staft with
the basics. ln this exclusive lesson, Emmanuel takes us
through a fingerstyle Pattern from the bottom up and demonstrates a few key techniques that add dazzle to his six-string feats of prestidigitation. So what does a guitarist need to do to play fingerstyle wellT First, concentrate on the thumb. The thumb plays what the left hand on the piano would play. lt does all the accompaniment. And if you want to play fingerstyle properly, you've reallY got to make Your thumb independent and get it to take
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care of all the backing so the melody and harmony can be taken care of by the fingers. What's the first step toward doing that? SteP one is to play with your thumb bY itself. Put all your pick-hand
fingers down on the face of the guitar. Mute the strings slightly with your palm; that way, the bass notes are in their own little Pocket, and. when it comes time to bring in a melody over them, they wonl be ringing too loud. Then you play something like this IFig. 1], which is all downstrokes with the thumb, starting every measure with the root note of the chord.
And step two? KeeP that bass going with the thumb and bring in the fingers to play chords at the beginning of each measure [Fig.2]. But step three is where You really come to the crossroads: Put in another chord accent
with your fingers between the thumb strokes IFig.3l. You're going to feel the Pull here, because your fingers will want to follow your thumb and vice versa, but after a while they'll get used to working independentlY. Where to from there? The next step is to play arpeg-
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he uses the Maton's onboard
APS pickuP system and Plugs into an AER Compaet 60 amP
via an Alesis Midiverb. His strings are Martin SPs {.012,0541, and his thumbpicks are Dunlop mediums.
gios with the fingers rather than straight chords. This is a standard pattern [Fig.4]hear how the thumb actually finishes the arpeggio that the fingers stan. Once you've got that together, you're ready to play a real song. Here's something based on "Freight Train," which is a tune I always teach people who are just starting to learn this style of playinS IFiS. 5]. The most important thing to keep in mind here is that you've got to establish a solid groove and keep it solid. When I play, l'm always tapping my feet and moving to the groove. lfeel time, lthink time, and I try to play time. lf you do all those thingsgetting your mind andyour
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body to move in time-your groove will get stronger. A
good bit of advice is to record yourself on something and listen back to hear how your groove is. lf you feel that it's not right. then you need to work on it. Practice with a metronome. And isn't it funny how those metronomes always slow down? Nice to know we're not the only ones who noticed that... On your latest album, you couple a Travis tune, "Cannonball Rag," with your own "Gameshow Rag," and you link the two with a nifty little ascending lick. That comes right from Merle, and Chet lAtkins] too. When you play it slow, it's got a real funky sound, almost iike something Leo Kottke might do. And when you play it at the actual tempo, it sounds
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like this IFig,61.
Another great feature of your playing is your use of Lenny Breau-style harp harmonics. Right, that's combining regular picked notes with artificial harmonics picked an octave up. Here's an example using a D9 chord-l'm covering the bottom two strings with one finger on my left hand. I start with a harmonic on the 6th string, then I move on to the 3rd string and pick that normally. And I keep that pattern going across the neck, continuing to alternate between harmonics and natural notes: 5, 2, 4, 1, 3 [Fig.7A]. Now l'll go back-
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wards and forwards with that pattern IFig.7Bi. The goal is to have the notes ring into one another so you can't tell them apart. lwatch the Guitar One CDROM for a more detailed
look at Emmanuel's harmonic techniques.l You also create a similar rippling effect by alternating open and fretting notes. That comes from Lenny
Breau too, as well as Chet and Jerry Reed. Here's a basic bread-and-butter lick in that style [Fig.8]. Once you've got that down, you can
try more elaborate ones
incorporating pull-offs IFig.
Then work on how you accent the notes: emphasize some, hold back on others, make it funky. Like everything we've talked about today, this is a technique you 91.
can use all kinds ofways.
