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.
Metheny manages to capture the wistful vibe of this Beatles classic while casting it in a bossa nova–inspired setting and updating it with his intricate sense of harmony and phrasing.
My instrumental arrangement of “Idumea” was originally conceived for clawhammer banjo, but here I’ve translated it to guitar with an alternating bass pattern.
Guitarist and W.C. Handy scholar Jon Shain shares strategies for adapting ragtime pieces for fingerstyle guitar using the 1917 Handy song "Beale Street Blues" as an example.
Learn to create a solo that has a certain kind of connectedness and unity, because it’s based around some related ideas instead of just whatever lick you happen to come up with at the moment.
This Weekly Workout will help you develop your frame of mind and confidence in solo fingerstyle improvisation on guitar via Tárrega's “Etude in E minor.”
Space can be good, but if you want to create a bigger sense of dimension, adding in chords as responses to single-note licks can give you a new depth and texture, while creating an additional level of call-and-response.
Look at how to play into the downbeat to create momentum in your fingerstyle blues soloing and explore different kinds of resolutions—short, long, and delayed.
Create call-and-response statements using Western swing chords. You’ll learn to play single-note licks on the I chord in the key of A major, answered by different combinations of sixth and ninth chords.
In this lesson, Bruce Molsky demonstrates how the guitar tradition from Madagascar takes in not only local music elements but classical and pop influences from everywhere.
