[Tele1111]

Hey David,

As you acknowledge, Jonny gave you some great insight.
He obviously is experienced. I was reading it and thinking-yes, yes, yes.
Solid advice all the way around.

The examples you linked are polar opposite in execution. As Jonny said, play around and see what you like well enough to want to play. Figure that out first, as that will have a big influence on what you need to make it work. Pickups, strings, technique.

I’m in the “between” category on strings. That is to say I prefer a light top heavy bottom set of string gauges. If I have a dedicated guitar for a much used open tuning, you can decide once again, on what you’re going to do with that guitar, and that will dictate what gauge of strings and what setup you need on that instrument.

Which brings me to my next point. I think it’s best to have at least two guitars dedicated to play fingerstyle. One that you keep in an open tuning, and one that is used for everything. You can use one guitar and retune constantly, but that’s hard for most audiences to accept. It’s simply more practical for you as a performer as well. The guitar you keep in a much used open tuning doesn’t have to stay there all the time. A lot of tunings have just one or two strings that can be retuned to get to another commonly used tuning.

I’ve tried and used a lot of soundhole pickups. But in truth, the styles I play don’t suffer without one. There are mag p/u’s That also have transducers, so you do get a bit of body resonance. But obviously they will amplify any percussive technique you use-intentional or not. Multi source is a must-but I’d stick with a mag without this feature if you wind up using any transducer
(k and k etc) as one of your sources.

Welcome to the rabbit hole.

Mark