Welcome To Fingerstyle Guitar Lessons To play fingerstyle guitar successfully two things become extremely important. 1. You need to be able to produce clear and perfect chords. This means that if you were to hold any chord and pick down each string one-by-one, each note would ring out clearly. If you can’t yet do this then please spend some time on improving the quality of your chords so that each one sounds perfect. Playing fingerstyle guitar will very quickly expose any flaws in your chords since it’s based upon picking individual strings within chords using patterns and sequences 2. You’ll need to organize your fingers into a well rehearsed unit. It’s essential to teach your fingers to work together as a team with each one knowing exactly what it’s responsible for playing - much like an army drill sergeant! Below is the best foundation for organizing your fingers so they’ll work together as a unified team. The idea is that each fingers should be responsible for a specific string. Once you’ve learned and practiced this grouping enough it will become completely automatic and second nature.
3 2 1 T T T
In the first part of the course we’ll be doing some exercises and drills to help this process become naturalized in your playing. The ideal goal is for it to become so well learned that you don’t even have to think about it, it will simply happen on its own. Then you’ll be free of ‘technical limitations’ and able to concentrate solely upon your chords and producing the best music you can.
Fingerstyle Guitar Lessons: “Swing Feel” In this section we’re going to ‘wave a magic wand’ and create a totally new and fresh style of finger picking based solely upon what we’ve already learned. We can do this, very simply, by changing the rhythm of how we play fingerstyle. Take a look at the example below...
3 2 1
1
T
T T
T
(T)
You can see how I’ve simply taken a pattern we’ve already learned and simply changed its ‘feel’ to a shuffle. Tap
Tap Tap
Tap Tap
Tap Tap
etc...
The effect is instantly recognizable and totally different from playing in straight 4/4 time. All we’ve done is change the rhythm. As an exercise, try playing the pattern with a straight feel and then with a shuffle feel, comparing the two as you go. Feel free to use any chord you like and once you’re comfortable get into some to the progressions which follow.
