Fingerstyle Guitar Technique(s)

[damian]

I’m not much of a fingerpicker, but I’d love to know more! Perhaps we need a few etudes and we post our progression? But great topic! 🤘

[Unknown Member]

@damian I’m happy to watch, listen to, and critique etudes, studies, exercises, etc. But I think that almost every guitarist who has started the journey into finger style has a long list of challenges that they already have identified. My concern is people learning a piece for the sake of learning a piece, and then ingraining sub-optimal technique. Better to work through trouble spots separately before putting all together. I’m here to help!

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by  Unknown Member.

[Gaghiggs]

I love playing fingerstyle, but like all my playing I’m self taught so have developed a technique which suits my style….. It would most likely make a trained fingerstyle guitarist violently ill to behold 😂

[Unknown Member]

@Gaghiggs in no way, shape, or form due I want to try to convert anyone to any interpretation of “proper technique”. I know that you have a tremendous amount to teach all of us with your fingerstyle techniques. To oversimplfy things, the challenge of all guitar playing is left-hand/right-hand synchronization. The challenges increase exponentially in fingerstyle because the brain is wired to have the hands mirror-image themselves often: whatever movement the LH index finger makes, the RH index finger wants to mimic that same movement, and vice-versa. There are many ways to break down the complexities of synchronization, and that’s one of the things that I want to explore within in a group here.

Your sense of harmony, timing, making melodies stand out over the accompaniment (very often syncopated in a sophisticated way), and especially your RH hand attack are all things of beauty. Carry on, as you were!

[Gaghiggs]

Cheers, a little bit of direction in my youth may have made my fingerstyle more efficient…. Looking at you RH ring finger 😂

[Unknown Member]

Regardless, all of your fingers are incredibly accurate. And your downward attack is consistent with the generally-regarded belief (along with supporting scientific evidence) that pushing the string down at an angle towards the soundboard and yourself, after release, produces an elliptical pattern that in turn produces more overtones and volume, thus producing better tone. My theory is that this is true because the waves bouncing back and forth between the bridge saddle and nut do not interfere with and cancel each other out, therefore the string does what it wants to do naturally, which is produce nodal points along the overtone series. At any given point in time, the vibrating string never quite follows the exact same path because of the quick attack and decay of a plucked string. The initial amplitude is the longest that ellipse is ever going to get. Subsequent elliptical shapes will get shorter and shorter, until the string returns into a state of rest. As one follows the other, robust string activation excites the wood in the soundboard to likewise amplify the overtones produced by the string. The more input from the string, the greater the output of the soundboard. Think of it as an elliptically-shaped screw that is widest at the top, then gets concentrically smaller and smaller, and any point of that screw never crosses itself, it’s only influenced by the points directly behind, which in turn influence the points directly after it.

What can horse all this up, however, is tension in the body of the player. Almost all of us, me included, hold scads of unobserved tension in our bodies as we play. At whatever points the guitar is touching your body, if we are not consciously trying to be a resonant chamber working with the guitar, we become a tone- and volume-sucking hindrance to the guitar. You see this most clearly in people who fret too hard in the left hand. There’s a reason in the recording studio that microphones are aimed at the soundboard. Having a left-hand touch that is commensurate in relaxation with the right hand, the neck is also a source of tone production, just more subtle than the soundboard. But this only happens if the left-hand finger and right-hand finger attacks at any one fret occur PRECISELY at the same time. I have an exercise for learning how to do this. Once mastered, notes will seem to explode out of the guitar. It requires strength in the left hand and fingers, and practicing slurs is key to that success in that realm.

Returning to the ideal situation described in the first paragraph, the goal then, in playing any song, is to keep the wood of the guitar, especially the soundboard, in a constant state of motion. You know how to do this intuitively, but I’ve no doubt you’ve practiced countless repetitions to achieve this end. Once you understand the concept, you can actually manipulate the vibrations of the soundboard at will, provided you have a deep understanding of the vibrational characteristics of your guitar. There is much to dig into here!

[Gaghiggs]

This will take some digesting Christian!! ☕☕☕

[Unknown Member]

The coffee force is strong here as well, French press with my own diabolical blend of dark roasts this morning. Wish I didn’t have to plant trees or I’d be practicing. If I proved anything to myself yesterday, it’s that I am not an enthusiastic arborist!

[Gaghiggs]

That’s why God invented concrete and decking 😂😂

[Patrickworld]

Working on my finger style as well, and after years of NOT doing it, it seems impossible

[Unknown Member]

I checked out your profile, great stuff! I’ve been listening to a lot of Grant Green and George Benson lately. Recently got turned on to Jimmy Ponder (a Wes Montgomery devotee) because he plays a lot of solo guitar fingerstyle and uses his thumb (like Wes) to play those sweeping octave runs. How he brushes the muted strings is really cool. Another player I pay a lot of attention to is Lenny Breau, that cat incorporated a ton of different right-hand fingerstyle techniques.

Thanks for sharing your frustrations with playing fingerstyle. Lord knows I also have my frustrations with it, but guitar is an endlessly fascinating toy so it’s easy to keep coming back for more. I’m currently studying “learning how to learn” with a former college classmate of mine. His research and methods are performance-based, extrapolations from scientific research and papers on professional athletes and musicians. It’s heady stuff, it’s very counterintuitive, but if you start to figure out what strategies and tactics best work with how your brain works (individual results can and do vary, not all neuropsychological strategies and tactics will work for everyone), you will easily see results in a week of daily practice.

I’m passionate about playing guitar fingerstyle and want to see others succeed at it, or at least increase their own enjoyment of it, even practicing what seems too hard (now) and making it easier (later). But you know what? There’s a million crazy-cool sounds and ideas that you can manifest on a guitar that a piano or a violin will never, ever be able to pull off. Add in the fact that it’s really easy for us to 1) deviate from EADGBE tuning into hundreds of other tunings 2) use a capo (changes tonal color of your guitar on a whim) 3) use various amplification, reverb, and effects, and it’s not difficult to see the allure of fingerstyle guitar, regardless of the style(s) you want to play. Personally, I’d like to experiment more with fingerstyle on the electric guitar, but I’m going more for Ted Greene these days (check him out) than Jeff Beck (RIP).

I don’t have a timeline yet for this, but I’m going to start putting together a set of short beginner tutorials that cover not only the beginner fundamentals, but the pre-fundamentals that develop the strength, coordination, and synchronization that fingerstyle requires. Playing with fingers only in both hands simultaneously is a very gymnastic thing, and if you don’t train every linkage in your playing mechanism, you’ll never play with flow.

If you don’t have one, I always strongly suggest to anyone serious about learning fingerstyle to obtain an inexpensive, student-model classical guitar. Brand new, with a soft-shell case, you can purchase one for $129.00 USD from Sweetwater, etc. If you live in area that sees a lot of garage/yard/thrift sales, particularly right now, when people are doing spring cleaning, you can pick one up for $25 or so. The reason I suggest this is not to convert you to become a classical guitarist. It’s that nylon strings are much more for forgiving on the fingers, and there are dozens, if not hundreds, of technical, strength, and conditioning exercises you can do on them, whereas a steel-string acoustic guitar would rip you to shreds.

As almost all athletes would agree that footwork is the basis for everything else they do, so too does guitar have basic positions in both hands which must be drilled early and often in order to build a foundation for success. How this look on every guitarist is individual to that guitarist, but the mechanics don’t change.

I’ll get to work on these short tutorials. In the meantime, if you have specific questions, please send me a message and I will answer them. Don’t give up!

• This reply was modified 1 year ago by  Unknown Member.