It's amazing how easily challenged I am. I'm just a few months in to learning blues finger picking. The first 2-3 months I was just learning individual licks from a David Hamburger TrueFire course. That worked really well because I was playing stuff that sounded like blues to me within a week or two of starting. The bite sized pieces really helped. And even some of those took me several days to really nail down.
Now I'm still doing his courses, but I've moved into more extended pieces with a number of challenging (to me!) sections stitched together. I'm working on a 24 bar piece right now and I've been trying to nail down the first four for about a week now. I'm getting there, but I'm not there yet. They repeat later in the piece, so it's not as depressing as it sounds, but this fingerpicking stuff really requires some rewiring of my brain and my right hand. My left hand is pretty conversant with blues technique, so that part has helped a lot. But my right hand feels like it's learning a new language, and it's dragging my brain along with it.
This stuff would probably be really easy stuff for most finger style players around here - a lot of folks could probably look at the music for what I'm playing now and have it down in ten minutes - but for me, its supremely challenging. But it's fun stuff and an amazing feeling of accomplishment to nail something down, because I couldn't do ANY of this a few months back.
-Ray
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