Seeking Advice Regarding Self-directed Study

[AX17609]

Originally Posted by asweet22

https://www.guitarvideos.com/

Every workshop I have purchased from them has been excellent. They have a new all-access pass, which could be overwhelming to a beginner, but is a fantastic deal.

I concur with this recommendation. I've taken at least a dozen of courses from Grossman and his stable of instructors.

[yaharadelta]

I'll throw in a few other sources that have worked for me. I started about 6-7 years ago with a desire similar to yours, fingerstyle blues moved me. Daddystovepipe has a great number of videos posted on YouTube, and I find his
approach works well for me. Here's a recently posted lesson on My Creole Belle, John Hurt style - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01LNLo-RN4E

I'd also recommend checking out Tom Feldman's site Play Country Blues. https://playcountryblues.com/

You mentioned Homespun, Happy Traum and John Sebastian put out a nice John Hurt DVD, here's an Acoustic Guitar Magazine link that will give you a feel for what's included on that DVD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5JsYj7IQMU&t=4s

We all learn differently, I found these three sources worked well for me. The end of your OP asked about the best way to proceed. I find the visual instruction and an understanding of the songs structure are best for me. I'd say jump in, pick a song or two, or three, that you like and get your feet wet. As you progress, you'll learn the song and ideally learn FROM the song. Good luck, it's a fascinating road.

[yaharadelta]

I'll throw in a few other sources that have worked for me. I started about 6-7 years ago with a desire similar to yours, fingerstyle blues moved me. Daddystovepipe has a great number of videos posted on YouTube, and I find his
approach works well for me. Here's a recently posted lesson on My Creole Belle, John Hurt style - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01LNLo-RN4E

I'd also recommend checking out Tom Feldman's site Play Country Blues. https://playcountryblues.com/

You mentioned Homespun, Happy Traum and John Sebastian put out a nice John Hurt DVD, here's an Acoustic Guitar Magazine link that will give you a feel for what's included on that DVD, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C5JsYj7IQMU&t=4s

We all learn differently, I found these three sources worked well for me. The end of your OP asked about the best way to proceed. I find the visual instruction and an understanding of the songs structure are best for me. I'd say jump in, pick a song or two, or three, that you like and get your feet wet. As you progress, you'll learn the song and ideally learn FROM the song. Good luck, it's a fascinating road.

[Geof S.]

Given the kind of music you are interested in, I would strongly recommend Ken Perlman's Fingerstyle Guitar. It's a method book that teaches folk/blues/old time fingerstyle using songs and song fragments from Hurt, Davis, Cotten, and the like. You can look on Amazon to see the kind of music it covers, they give a list of some songs.

Perlman's book is not the best choice for learning actual songs, because the focus is on learning the fingerstyle techniques needed to play this kind of music. As a result, many of the arrangements are rather short, and some are merely song fragments. The book is, however, IMO one of the best choices for learning the techniques necessary to play old-time American fingerstyle songs.

Anyone who makes it all the way through Perlman's book will be in a good position to play many traditional folk, blues, and fiddle tunes.

[Charlie Bernstein]

Originally Posted by Jaywalk3r

. . . Are there online resources that I can use in conjunction with the old songs I actually want to learn and still get some sense of coherency?

There are countless YouTubes to watch. For instance, if you haven't watched any Stefan Grossman tutorials, he's one of the old-school master teachers.

When do I jump in with learning songs?

Now.

How do I determine which songs are appropriate for early learning?

Start with easy songs. Of course.

Should I focus on notation or tablature (or both)?

What works for someone doesn't work for everyone. Only you can judge what's right for you. Experiment. That's what the rest of us do.

I can understand both, but in real time cannot convey to my left hand the information from either.

Just use your tab or sheet music to learn. Once a song is up to speed, you don't need to read while you play.

Start slowly — one beat at a time. Soon you'll be able to play the whole song slowly.

Then gradually speed it up. Two important facts of learning musical isntruments:

- Anything you can play slowly you can play fast.

- If you can hear it in your head, you can figure it out.

. . . Thanks in advance . . . !

You're welcome in advance!

Don't fixate on finding a mythical "right" approach. The three rules of proficiency: Woodshed, woodshed, woodshed.

Any plan is better than no plan. So just get going. And keep us posted on your progress!

[Brent Hutto]

If you're lucky, you will get some enjoyment from the process of (very, very slowly at first) learning tunes beat by beat, phrase by phrase and/or transcribing tunes yourself if you don't have sheet music for them. Being able to spend a couple hours at a stretch and have it feel like "fun", or at least feel rewarding, will let you do enough of it so you're eventually moving faster through learning each tune. If that sort of careful, step-by-step learning feels like work or tedium, what you're trying to do is going to be difficult because there really aren't any shortcuts!

[Ryan51]

I learned "Freight Train" by Elizabeth Cotton from this tutorial. I found it can be fingerpicked with just the thumb and first finger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPWEuoaQYQo

[Earl49]

When this topic comes up I usually suggest these Homespun titles:
- Easy Steps to Guitar Fingerpicking - 3 Volume Set (basics)
- Easy Steps to Acoustic Blues Guitar - 2 Volume Set (blues focused)

There are also tons of song-specific or style-specific videos from Stefan Grossman's Guitar Workshop and Homespun, plus many others. I could never find a useful local instructor for the styles I wanted to learn, so I am largely self taught dating back to Kicking Mule vinyl LP's and tab books. I prefer DVD courses lately. The visual aspect really helps me get there quicker. I built a repertoire of songs mostly learned by rote from tab, then later came to a deeper understanding, such as: this is simply the C7 shape moved up to E7 pitches, and leads back to the root chord.

[MidnightPicker]

You might like these two books:
Beginning Fingerstyle Guitar - John Miller, Stefan Grossman Guitar Workshop series (w online audio)
Beginning Fingerstyle Blues Guitar - Arne Baker, Mark Galbo (w CD audio)

I’ve just started working through each, but they focus on older blues and folk music and the exercises ease you into working on alternating bass thumb and finger patterns.

[mawmow]

Hi !
I am sorry I did not see this thread before.

So you want to learn to play the artists’music you named in the fingerstyle way.

You already got good suggestions I second : Stefan Grossman’s workshops and daddystovepipe.

I would put emphasis on Vestapol company’s herd held by Stefan Grossman and
add another one held by Happy Traum, Homespun video (especially Fred Sokolow).

But those will not get you much musical theory. There are numerous books devoted to theory.

There is a thin book about « fretboard as a roadmap » you could start with.

I recently went through a Mel Bay’s book about jazz arranging : it really made some more
concepts clear to me. It does not dive that much in jazz but explains how to make things work.
I believe jazzmen are certified harmony builders.

But honestly, what did help me most was to make my own sketches starting with the basic
C major scale, then the other ones, and finally putting them on a fretboard to see how chords
are built, major as well as minor ones. Besides that, you could be interested learning short
bass runs to tie chords : That is what lead me to fingerstyle !

You are going on a very long journey and you have to be patient.

[rick-slo]

I had a background in playing piano for many years prior to playing guitar and that helped quite a bit. For me a couple of things:

Developing a good ear by listening a lot to music to understand better what you like and why (tune structure, expressive playing, etc.)

Practice enough on pieces you decide to work on so that you play them very well. No habit of half-baked efforts

[Annie B]

I think it's really important to have long-term, achievable goals and that these goals should focus your practice. I returned to the guitar after a long absence with a similar plan: I wanted to focus on fingerstyle, and learn Americana tunes (including blues). My long-term goal has been to choose songs I want to play and sing, develop a fingerpicking pattern to accompany my singing, and develop/create solos as guitar breaks.

Here's what has worked with me: I went online and looked at all the instruction books for learning fingerstyle guitar patterns and technique, read the reviews, and chose two: Dan Thorpe's Fingerstyle 101 (he's a terrific all-around teacher too), which I completed in about 7 or 8 months, and Mark Hanson's The Art of Travis Picking, which I'm continuing to work through. But here's where the magic has come for me: A book by Larry McCabe called 101 Easy Fingerstyle solos, which includes short simple solos for 101 standard Americana songs (with some celtic sprinkled in) and that's exactly what they are, with some tunes a bit more challenging than others. Songs are in basic CAGED keys, which I've learned are important to master bc they provide a foundation for everything else. Now, what's great is that bc the solos are short, once mastered, you can use your own creativity to embellish and extend them, and therefore, devote precious time to developing your ear and your own arrangements. By contrast, if you're spending that time learning often challenging arrangements by the greats (which I did for years with a flatpick) you're not developing your own creative instinct.

I'm amazed by the progress I've made in 7 months and am working on about 7 seven songs I love. I divide my practice time into two periods each day. (I'm now retired so can practice 2 -4 hours a day.) In the first, I work on technique, and in the second, I work on songs. Of course, the songs are extensions of technique. On the technique side, I'm also working on single-line reading studies (old book by Sid Cooper) which I'm studying in the 5th position in order to expand my knowledge of the fretboard and that's working too. Finally, I'm studying chords and chord progressions from Leavitt's volume 1 of the Berklee guitar Method. But digging into the 1st two books (Thorpe and McCabe) is what inspired me to go to the other two books, which I studied 30 years but never got anywhere with--because I didn't have a clear, well-defined goal.

I'm going to study theory with an instructor, but only in the context of my goal. Good luck to you friend. You're well on your way bc you know the music you want to study and master to your ability level. And always remember, you can create beautiful music at whatever technical level you achieve.

[christonaguitar]

I started quite recently compared to a lot of people on here (4 years ago) also with the aim to focus on finger picking and just learn songs that I liked.

I didn't use any books, just youtube. To be honest these days on youtube there's an absolute wealth of information on pretty much anything you could possibly want to learn. You just have to find quality material. Some lessons are good, others not so much and leave you more confused than where you began.

I remember trying to learn Freight Train by Elizabeth Cotten as my first song but quickly realised that it was unrealistic to learn both right hand picking and left hand fretting at the same time. So I just focussed on learning the basic open chord shapes with simple strumming before then going on to learn Freight Train. Just the f-barre chord took a while to get down. For learning Freight Train, I went on Youtube and found a tutorial with tabs.