Quote:
Originally Posted by Brent Hutto
So how would you refer, in the fewest possible words, to the style of playing that (for instance) Ed Gerhard uses in his "Water Is Wide" arrangement?
He's using fingernails to play slowly and freely in an altered tuning with no identifiable alternating bass. That's about 17 words and it would nice to have a 1, 2 or 3 word phrase that most people understood to mean that style.
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I see no problem with "fingerstyle". I've certainly never - in the more than 50 years I've been playing with my fingers - understood that term to refer to a
specific kind of fingerstyle, as is being suggested here. I.e.,"some sort of blues or folk alternating bass style."
When I want to refer to
that specific type of fingerstyle I call it "alternating bass." Otherwise, for me, "fingerstyle" includes classical guitar as well as all kinds of folk and blues guitar playing which does not use a pick. (I realise there is a style which sounds like fingerstyle but uses a pick: namely "hybrid picking", which is of course a name for that style in its own right!)
And I also know that the "alternating bass" style goes by one or two other names: "thumb style", "Travis picking", or (I believe) "Piedmont style". ("Travis picking" is perhaps a slightly narrower technique within that style, involving damped bass.)
As I said above, it seems to be that the people who use "fingerstyle" to mean
nothing but "alternating bass" must come from the American country/folk/blues community, where the "normal" way of playing guitar is with a flatpick (strumming or bluegrass flatpicking), and the most common way of playing without a pick is "alternating bass" - so the latter would be what they usually mean by "fingerstyle".
That's obviously crazy - narrow, parochial. And as irritating in its way as those classical fans who use the word "music" to refer to classical music alone, as if other kinds of music don't exist or are not worthy of consideration. (And I just saw another instance of latter in a newspaper this very day!)
To any sensible person, "fingerstyle guitar" ought to mean the guitar played with the fingers (including the thumb!) - in whatever genre - so obviously includes Gerhard's style. In fact the only difference between his style and conventional classical guitar technique is that he is using steel strings.
There was a term in use back in the 1960s to refer to the fancier kind of steel-string fingerstyle, which was "folk baroque". That did indeed include certain baroque classical influence, but also blues and jazz along with the folk influences. It was mostly
not "alternating bass", although the most well-known folk-baroque players also used alternating bass frequently. But generally speaking it was all "fingerstyle" or "fingerpicking" - that's what those guys would have called it anyway (probably more likely the former). Gerhard might well have been lumped with them back in the day.