When You Finally Master a Challenging Fingerstyle Piece

[Rocky Dijohn]

It can be frustrating at times, and often you want to quit and wonder why you are even bothering with it. You are tired of beginner and perhaps even intermediate pieces, but in any case you are always wanting to up your game.

So you spend countless hours laboring over it, measure by measure, tab in hand and possibly video (performance or instructional). You know the chords, the overall structure and the licks. You can play them in isolation, but not together. You isolate and focus on those difficult passages that seem like scaling Mount Everest, working them over and over. Hmm.....maybe a different fingering approach will make it work for you.

Slowly and bit by bit, you persevere and get to that point of Nirvana: You know it cold, can play it through cleanly, and can focus on clarity of execution and THE SOUND. You become one with the music and have no thought. It is almost like meditation. You have arrived, and you will always own this piece.

And this is why you keep coming back to it, right?

[rick-slo]

Some of them. It's not like a painting you might have done. It's ephemeral.
I like to move on - one reason I started recording things.

[TBman]

Sometimes I will go back to something I've done before, sometimes not. I have a few I want to work on again and re-record now that I've found my optimum recording area.

There are so many tunes ahead of me that I want to tackle, that the ones behind me sort of get left in the dust and forgotten.

[reeve21]

I hear you, Rocky. You are describing my feeling about a piece in the Woody Mann book you just ordered, My Creole Baby, which is his take on the great John Hurt classic My Creole Belle.

It's not a very challenging piece, but I had only been finger picking a couple of months when I dug into it, and it took me a good long while to get it to flow. I still play it often, over a year later. And it led me down the rabbit hole of MJH music, as I really didn't know much about him when I started on this piece.

I totally get where you are coming from. It is great to be striving, but also nice to play a piece you know cold so you can work on dynamics, feeling, i.e. making music

[SouthpawJeff]

I’m not there yet, I know several pieces, but mostly easy ones. The difficult ones are coming along, but I certainly don’t have any down 100% yet. Also as far as owning it forever.... I don’t know about that. I find I start losing bits if I don’t play them for an extended amount of time. If there are folks that can learn a piece and just own it forever I’m envious. But it won’t stop me from trying🙂

Good luck,
Jeff

[DukeX]

I get where you are coming from. However, depending on where we are in our guitar journey, we all approach the guitar differently.

Without going into specifics, I play for rhythm first, tone second, technique (perfection) third. It is understood that all three affect the others, and my focus on each may vary depending on how new the piece is to me. Technique/the pursuit of perfection, is certainly important but not my top priority.

The irony is I only play my own compositions.

[DCCougar]

Originally Posted by DukeX

I get where you are coming from. However, depending on where we are in our guitar journey, we all approach the guitar differently.

I'm often amazed that I can sort of reproduce even part of a piece very early on. Watching someone do it on youtube really opens up the opportunities. Oh, that's how they do it! Plus, I don't always fingerpick it exactly like the original. I make it my own. If it's not quite as good, hey, I'm not getting paid either!

[JonPR]

Originally Posted by Rocky Dijohn

It can be frustrating at times, and often you want to quit and wonder why you are even bothering with it. You are tired of beginner and perhaps even intermediate pieces, but in any case you are always wanting to up your game.

So you spend countless hours laboring over it, measure by measure, tab in hand and possibly video (performance or instructional). You know the chords, the overall structure and the licks. You can play them in isolation, but not together. You isolate and focus on those difficult passages that seem like scaling Mount Everest, working them over and over. Hmm.....maybe a different fingering approach will make it work for you.

Slowly and bit by bit, you persevere and get to that point of Nirvana: You know it cold, can play it through cleanly, and can focus on clarity of execution and THE SOUND. You become one with the music and have no thought. It is almost like meditation. You have arrived, and you will always own this piece.

And this is why you keep coming back to it, right?

I agree about that point you arrive at: where you know it cold. It's all under your fingers. That's the point where you start actually playing it - performing it, as a piece of music with all the appropriate expression. Owning it, like you say.
Learning a tune is not the end of the process - "OK done that, now for the next one". It's the end of the beginning. It's the beginning of the real thing. You've tamed the beast, and now you can enjoy riding it.

At the same time, "keep coming back to it" means the process itself, learning a new tune, yes? Not just coming back to that first tune the whole time? You do both.

[Rocky Dijohn]

Yes, I mean that once you have finally achieved a goal like that, it creates an incentive to stay in the guitar-playing game/hobby and look for new challenges. You "own" the piece you conquered in the sense that it can drop out of your repertoire for a while but if you ever return to it you will probably get it up to speed much easier due to mental and muscle memory. So you keep doing "it" ---- playing guitar and possibly that piece as well, but always looking for new adventures.