What is fingerstyle? Fingerstyle guitar is a technique that uses the thumb and fingers to sound individual strings instead of relying on a pick. The ability to leverage individual fingers allows guitarists to play multiple parts at once, with separate bass lines, melodies, and accompaniment, often leading those who first hear a fingerstyle recording to think they are hearing more than one guitar.
Check out Jeffrey Pepper Rodgers' fingerstyle guitar arrangements of 3 Christmas classics: “The First Noel,” “Joy to the World,” and “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen.”
For a gentle introduction to ragtime, I composed a simple G-major instrumental, “Davis Street Rag,” in which the syncopation always occurs in a predictable place, the “and” of beat three.
Like millions of Americans, Eric Skye, the virtuoso jazz and roots guitarist, is currently under a shelter-in-place order—and making the best of it. He’s been hunkered down at his home, in Portland, Oregon, cooking and playing guitar with his wife and children, and contemplating on what is happening in the…
These 17 solo arrangements in Celtic Songs for Fingerstyle Guitar are from the British Isles and beyond, in Orkney and other tunings, with standard notation, tablature, and performance notes.
If you have spent any amount of time exploring the world of fingerstyle guitar, you no doubt have heard of Travis picking. (For a refresher, see “The Nuts and Bolts of Travis Picking”) Named after the country-and-western guitarist Merle Travis, it’s a popular style of fingerpicking that has since worked its…
In this lesson, I’ll show you how to play an approachable ragtime piece of mine in open G6 called “Liberal Rag,” a title I chose not necessarily as a political statement but to indicate that it can be played at an easy and relaxed tempo, by players at all levels.
In third position or higher, it becomes possible to combine open and fretted strings to play ascending/descending intervals on nonsequential strings. This technique is called cross-string picking.
Natural harmonics are produced at specific locations, or nodes, that divide an open string into equal parts. The pitch is determined by the number of divisions. Dividing the string in half at the 12th fret produces the first harmonic; dividing the string into three parts at the seventh fret produces the second harmonic; dividing the string into four parts at the fifth fret produces the third harmonic; and so on.
Often called Piedmont guitar—after the East Coast regions, running from Virginia to North Carolina, where many of the players lived—this challenging style makes use of an upbeat fingerpicking technique, which I’ll break down for you in this lesson.
Play notes legato with hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides. Play through today’s examples from the Alex de Grassi Fingerstyle Guitar Method to hear the difference once legato embellishments are added. The melody in Example 2 is very plain, consisting of only half notes and quarter notes. Play it through a few times, using an alternating i–m pattern…
I encourage you to focus first on getting the melody down. Once you have that in your blood, you may feel free to explore your own bass lines and arpeggios.
As a fingerstyle steel-string guitarist, you might assume that your instrument precludes learning classical literature. But this isn’t actually the case.
For this lesson, I’ve written a Johnson-inspired blues in A major that teaches you the typical intro, walkdown, fills, verses, and guitar break he used in songs.
