EP145 – Delta Blues Fingerstyle Guitar Lesson

[sciencefiction]

My first attempt at fingerstyle. It took me a month to get this far. Very painful, literally and figuratively. But I’m glad I persevered, thanks to Charjo’s and Doug’s postings on this.

[6stringer Pete]

Nice guitar, nice playing, nice feeling and a little hop’n on them heels topped it off!

The melody of the notes is what expresses the art of music . 🙂 6stringerPete

It really is all about ”melody”. The melody comes from a language from our heart. Our heart is the muscle in music harmony. The melody is the sweetness that it pumps into our musical thoughts on the fretboard. 🙂 6 stringer Pete

Pete
Active Melody
Forum Moderator

[charjo]

Great job, Sciencefiction. You picked a tough one for your first fingerstyle. Good tempo and very consistent, I really enjoyed it.
John

[Duffy P]

That’s pretty awesome for your first fingerstyle. You kept the groove and the structure throughout, and so it sounded perfectly natural, without stutters or hesitations. Well done. Interesting looking guitar.

[Bryce-AKguitar]

Nice job on this Sciencefiction! It nice to see you posting again.

-Bryce
Anchorage, Alaska

[WBlues]

Hi Sciencefiction, that was beautifully played.
Fingerstyle was implemented by You is excellent. If You hadn’t written, I would not believe that it is Your first piece with this technique.
By the way: great Sound!

Wilfried

Play guitar just like you live; don't get bogged down in theory, it's just a tool without feeling.

Wilfried

[smilefred]

Nicely done Larry!! Really Impressive to be your first fingerstyle. You’ve kept the groove well!! One these days I will give it a go as well, You’ve inspired me
Ale

[Vojtech]

Nicely done, you stayed on time the whole time, thats no small feat on these fingerstyle arrangements!

My Youtube Playlist

[Doug T]

WOW GREAT that is a tough one and you blew right through it. I’ve been missing your posts, Red House is the last one I remember, you did great one that too.
PS really like the guitar 🙂

[Mick M]

That was awesome, really enjoyed it

Nice guitar!

[Qui R]

fantastic !

a great example what you can achieve with hard work and a month of practicing. Your rythm sense is really good and consistant. I know how hard it is to do, i just started my first fingerstyle lesson here on this site, but i picked an ‘easy’ one for this (EP 142), but i’m working on that lesson for a week now, and it’s so hard to do when you never played fingerstyle before. So i have deep respect how far you came with that much more complex lesson in one month.

Looking forward to see more videos of you.

[kubrider]

Hi Larry, Like everyone else before me. Great job, hard to believe it’s your first ever finger style attempt. You kept perfect timing throughout sounded great. Your overall timing has improved significantly!! Keep up the good work. I’ve recently started playing this piece and found the two bar chords right at the end impossible to play on my acoustic, just can’t get all the notes to ring clearly consistently. What gauge strings are you using?
Rob

[bri-uklefty]

Great one sir and you really kept that groove going while covering all of the picking action really well. It swept me along with you and really enjoyed it.

Please keep this one in your ‘warm up’ repertoire and don’t let the content evaporate after so much hard work. Use it to drop back into and then you’ll just be able run this one out fluently anytime without thought or effort, like driving the car.

Cheers Bri

[Don D.]

That sounded really great! If you can get that in a month of practice, damn, that’s inspiring. Congratulations!

Don D.

[JohnF]

Awesome playing. You persevered and your recording turned out great.

[sciencefiction]

Thanks, everybody. I really appreciate your favorable comments.

That guitar I used is a Luna Trinity Cutaway Parlor Acoustic –Electric Guitar (relatively inexpensive at $340). I wanted a cutaway parlor acoustic guitar, and this is about the only I could find after browsing the internet. It is a little bit bigger than my Seagull acoustic parlor guitar (not a cutaway), but still pretty small. I have found I can play up around the 14th-15th frets with no problem with this guitar. I had to get some adjustments made to prevent buzzing at the 14th fret however.

Thanks, Doug for your comments on this one and Redhouse. I practice that Redhouse Intro all the time and the Crossroads solo too just to try to stay in shape and get better. When learning fingerstyle in this lesson I wasn’t able to practice with the pick as much and worried that trying to play fingerstyle would mess up my pick playing. However, there seems to be no effect and my pick playing may even be somewhat better—who knows? I’m sure all you guys who could already do both styles must have known this.

To Rob’s (kubrider) question, I use D’Addario EJ15 Phosphor Bronze, Extra Light, 10-47 stings because I like to be able to stretch the strings as much as possible on the acoustic guitar. With the Luna acoustic , the strings are really stretchy. I have the same problem with the last two bar chords (getting all the notes to ring cleanly on acoustic). I think this is because of the depressions on the underside of your two knuckles on your index finger (my theory anyway). By shifting my index finger around slightly (and/or pressing harder) I can feel something mesh and then make better contact with the strings. However, it’s more difficult to do this adjustment while playing, of course.

By the way, I found the website below to show a good comparison of what all the different string guages sound like on the acoustic guitar.

[Scott M]

Hey Larry fantastic work my friend!!! Timing, tempo and technique all sounding great. Really well done.

Scott

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