Fingerstyle

ewal

Chanced upon this guy the other day - I don't know how it took me so long. How would love to play the guitar like this, even just an approximation would do...

streethawk

It's not as hard as it looks. Just watch his picking hand, not as much going on as you might think!

ewal

Guess so. Better get growing my nails!

BahHumbug

Yeah the right hand is doing some very conventional fingerpicking. The interest comes from the combination of that with slides, hammers and pulloffs in the left hand. Sounds like guitar is tuned lowish, hence the buzzy tone, also it's some modal or open tuning.

ewal

The tuning is in the comments - CGCGCD - that's the easy bit. I think the tone comes from the combination of loose strings and his fingernails. I did set out about a year or so a go to learn a bit of finger-picking, but needless to say I didn't stick at it... Time to have another go.

mgaw

Step 1...alternating bass with the thumb once you have that the rest will fall into place

earwighoney

When it comes to fingerpicking, the song above isn't as tricky as it looks.  

For the first part anyway, he's playing the melody on the high strings fingerpicking them with his index and middle finger and play drones on the lower strings with his thumb. 

Fairly sure it's based around the scale of C Major.

menamestom

Just get a fingerstyle guitar book and learn a few patterns, it's actually pretty easy to learn the basics. Alternating thumb bass notes are the key really as @mgaw says. 

You don't need nails that long, in fact I'd find them more of a hindrance than a help.  You don't need nails at all, but I like just a bit of nail, so they go to the end of my fingers and no more.

I recorded this the other day https://youtu.be/hp2oUvnv0PE

Tunes like this you can find on the Stefan Grossman site or Truefire etc and are a good place to start as the left hand is just C and F, simple tunes which are nice and get the Right hand working.  Can't remember where I got this one from, think it was an app....

ewal

Thanks folks. Keep the instructional and example videos coming - I'm definitely going to work on this. It's a long time since I tried to learn anything new!

eSully

@Ewal - If you're starting off with fingerpicking you could try some of Jackson C Franks songs as a good starting point. Less complicated than this and in standard tuning but a lot of the same basic ideas, you can build up to something more complicated then

Tabs

ewal

Excellent - cheers.

Sambostar

My fingerstyle sucks.  I can do fast alternate thumb picks and third middle and first finger rolls and combinations and improvise this way keeping the thumb going, but going the other way around I get unstuck and slow.  It's why learning proper banjo forward rolls is taking ages. 

The way I see it, it's because I'm lazy and when you drum your fingers on your right hand it happens naturally from right to left, ring, index, first finger etc.

Is there a secret to it other than practice?

Lewy

From a listening point of view, if you like this you should check out John Fahey ....the piece in the YouTube video is clearly influenced by him. Check out Fahey's "Sunflower Blues" which used a similar tuning (open C - CGCGCE).

ewal

Thanks - I will do. It's a whole new musical area for me to go and explore.

Lewy

If you're getting into fingerstyle in general I'd also highly recommend that you check out Big Bill Broonzy, even if you're not into blues, because he had a very interesting approach that not so many people replicate - as opposed to an alternating bass, he just thumped out a steady bass hitting the bottom strings together, and then did the fancy stuff on top of that. Lots of bluesmen used this "dead thumb" approach (like Lightnin' Hopkins) but Broonzy was different because he did more interesting melodic stuff with it as opposed to just blues licks over the bass- check out his version of "Glory of Love". Very adaptable to other types of material and a nice change from alternating bass "travis picking".

BigLicks67

+1 for John Fahey & Sunflower Blues - here's a good version:

.

You should probably listen to Tyler's electric guitar stuff with Lambchop as well.

ewal

Thanks. I've got my hands on a couple of his solo albums. Don't know how I've missed Lambchop up until now.

BRISTOL86

Sorry to hijack the thread, but didn't seem worth posting a new one just for this...

Has anyone here learned a version of 'The Last Steam Engine Train' by John Fahey?

I've been really interested in this piece since I heard it played by Tony Polecastro of 'The Acoustic Letter' - not sure if anyone here is familiar with their videos on YouTube? He plays it a bit slower than most other versions I've heard, and I've just started trying to learn the first section from this little video

https://youtu.be/nEceEOc9oas

As a relative newbie to the guitar (c. 3 months of real learning) the Travis picking is certainly really testing the limits of my co-ordination!