FINGERPICKING ACADEMY
Welcome to the Fingerpicking Academy
Structured courses to maximize what you learn
BEGINNER
Beginner: From Zero to Fingerpicker in 30 Days
This course is ideal if you are a complete beginner to guitar – or a beginner to guitar fingerpicking. It is also perfect if you are a failed beginner (someone who tried to learn guitar before but didn’t succeed or no longer plays regularly)
Having taught thousands of students, I learned that the key to learning guitar is for the student to sound musical within minutes of starting to learn! I promise that if you adopt the traditional method of strumming chords and trying to change them quickly – it is hard to sound musical after a few days.
We start with just one chord and learning patterns of how to pluck the individual strings of that chord, then it is magic. Life is interesting from day one! By the time we introduce the second chord, you are already a bit of a guitar player!
The course has five sections
- Getting Started (identifying string names, a few chords, reading tablature, using a metronome)
- Fingerpicking Basics (how fingerpicking works, several fingerpicking patterns)
- The Thumb (does the work of the bass player; alternating bass, walking bass, more fingerpicking patterns)
- The Fingers (advanced patterns, pinching, sequence length and writing your own fingerpicking patterns)
- Advanced (clear breakdowns of advanced techniques like Travis Picking and Clawhammer)
Each section has 5-7 individual lessons with a homework exercise after each lesson. At the beginning of the following lesson, I will give tips for anyone stuck with practical ways to get it mastered if you’re finding it difficult.
What you will learn
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Play the most common guitar chords
- Play these chords in a fingerpicking style
- Learn new fingerpicking patterns
- Decompose fingerpicking patterns into the bass/thumb and the melody/fingers
- Read guitar tablature and play along to a metronome
- Compose your own fingerpicking patterns using a method that works!
- Apply Travis Picking and Clawhammer styles
INTERMEDIATE
Intermediate Fingerpicker Course
If you are already able to play several fingerpicking patterns using the thumb and fingers, then this course will help you take it to the next level.
in this course, we focus on put the fingerpicking that you have to good use. We’ll learn how to fingerpick the blues and learn some advanced fingerpicking pieces.
We also expand your bass patterns, make your melodies richer (using hammer-ons and pull-offs that blend into the fingerpicking) and using scales.
What you will learn
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Play bass patterns over common chords
- Play scales
- Construct your own melodies
- Learn the fundamentals of reading rhythm
- Weave hammer-ons and pull-offs into your fingerpicking
- Play several advanced fingerpicking pieces
- Fingerpick a 12-bar blues in E
ADVANCED
Advanced Guitar Fingerpicking
Click edit button toSome of the building blocks to becoming a modern acoustic fingerstyle musician with your own voice and your own sound are identified here and hopefully will help you to push through the common boundaries of having set chords, set patterns, set riffs and years of formed habits. It’s time to really become inspired again. I’m absolutely confident that this will be your experience.
This course gives you the building blocks to become a modern fingerstyle musician with your own voice and sound. Beyond the common boundaries of the chords you know, the patterns you have learned, set riffs that you use and years of formed habits, it’s time to push the boundaries to become inspired again.
There are 4 sections sections in this course:
- Advanced Rhythm and Polyrhythms
- A look at Chet Atkins technique and study of the song Windy & Warm
- A look at Doc Watson’s technique and the song Deep River Blues
- Advanced Techniques (harmonizing scales, adding percussive elements, alternate tunings)
What you will learn
By the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Play in a fingerpicking style using 3/2 polyrhythms
- Harrmonize scales and incorporate wide interval playing into your fingerstyle playing
- Use a variety of bass patterns within a single song
- Add percussive elements to your repertoire
- Learn awesome sounding version of classics like Deep River Blues, Windy & Warm and Lean On Me
- Understand the thought process to make your acoustic sound like the orchestra it is
Amazing lessons. And it got better right until the end. Thanks, Patrick!