Fingerstyle Guitar Tutorials

[ChetPreston]

Hi. I'm interested in figuring out what fingerstyle beginners look for in guitar tutorials. I've been developing a website (in tag) that's designed primarily to share my guitar arrangements. However, as I've encountered during my own fingerstyle training, it can be really hard to decipher a fingerstyle tab, e.g. which finger/hand is used to play a note or how a percussive element is played or introduced in the tab. Therefore, I'm thinking of doing tutorials that address these questions for my arrangements. The problem I ran into when I was trying to think how to film a tutorial, however, was what to omit.

For example, this first song felt weird to go over the first minute in detail, with the exception of a few notes I would want to convey. The last 40 seconds, on the other hand, can be really tricky to figure out how to play from the tab alone or deduce why I arranged it in that particular way (since it can be played dozens of ways).


And in this second example, the part starting at 2:33 adds a few new elements to the percussive arsenal that is difficult to annotate in the tab alone. Additionally, the way I did this particular video does not make it easy to follow along for the viewer looking to learn the arrangement.


So my question is this: What are the key elements you look for in a tutorial? Completeness? Attention to tricky details? Clear video of hands? On screen tabs? Something else?

[TBman]

I'm not a beginner, but what most people ask about when starting to play fingerstyle is how to get "thumb independence." Then everyone tells them there is really no such thing it just seems that way. Once people get the dexterity in their picking hand it all falls in place.

So I would say to take a simple tune with a travis picking style and teach it at various speeds, starting with super slow motion.

Once someone gets past the thumb issue, they are fine.

You might want to target the intermediate level and just play one of your tunes through, provide the notation, and then do a walk through without getting too deep into it.

An awful lot of players here are not into percussive at all so be aware of that.

[JERZEY]

Firstly and IMO the most important is you need to supply or provide link to a playable guitar file like gtpro. It should be a requirement.