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There are many ways of learning to fingerpick on guitar, but a structured course is easily the most effective approach. A fingerpicking course should teach you the correct technique, musical examples, and how to blend the playing of the bass strings with the thumb along with the melodies of the individual notes with the fingers.
A good course will enable you to commit 15 minutes per day to making a positive step along the road of mastering fingerpicking. The 'structure' of the course should enable the student to master isolated exercises which then stack in a logical way to result in an awesome fingerpicking outcome.
It is recommended to have a few fingerpicking pieces as your target. Even if those seem way beyond your level at the beginning, this provides excellent motivation for sticking with it.
A well-structured course should enable a complete beginner to competently fingerpick the basic patterns within one month. The student should commit 15 minutes per day to make this kind of progress.
This progress is possible - even if the student has zero musical experience, cannot yet play any chords and has no experience playing other musical instruments.
Like any other discipline in life, if you watch a true master then it's going to appear magical to watch. When you have a structured approach to learning, then your goal is just to master the next lesson. The teacher has already figured out the order of the building blocks to maximize your results.
It's not true that fingerstyle is "really hard". I actually recommend it as the way to learn guitar for complete beginners! A beginner can learn one chord and do many interesting fingerpicking things in their first hour of learning. This isn't true with the strumming of chords or playing lead guitar. Start with fingerpicking because it is the easiest way to learn!
The best time to learn fingerstyle guitar was 20 years ago. The next best time is today!
As I mentioned above, fingerstyle guitar is an ideal way for complete beginners to learn guitar. It's also great for "failed beginners" - people who tried a few times to learn guitar but it never stuck. The reason it never stuck was because it just took too many hours of practice before getting a musical reward. That's why the failed beginner didn't find it sticking. This changes with fingerstyle because you get the ability to sound musical instantly.
Guitar players who find a plateau and are stuck in their playing also really love fingerpicking because it opens up the world of being able to play your own bassline and melody at the same time (in the intermediate level). This brings a whole new world to guitarists who just needed something new to inspire them.
The truth is that any guitar can be used for fingerstyle, whether it be acoustic, electric with nylon strings or steel strings - it doesn't matter.
The best guitar for fingerstyle is the one you have right now. Do not let a guitar be an obstacle to learning fingerpicking. If you were thinking of buying a guitar anyway, I would suggest a steel string with light-guage strings. It will mean a little bit of finger pain for the first few days on the tips of the fingers, but it's worth it. If you really fear the tips of your fingers being sore for a few days, try an acoustic guitar with nylon strings.
If you are a complete beginner or failed beginner, then the Zero to Guitar Fingerpicking in 30 days is my beginner level course. You need zero experience to start - you don't even need to know any chords.
If you have played a bit of guitar but not a lot, then I would still recommend the Zero to Guitar Fingerpicking course. The first section teaches the basics like string names, chords and reading tab and then the next sections go quite far into basslines, fingerpicking patterns and travis picking. The course moves quite quickly focusing on doing a lot of fingerpicking with just a few chords.
If you are able to fingerpick with alternate bass and travis picking, I recommend the Intermediate course as your next step. Here we will make melodies stand out with hammer-ons, pull-0ffs, slides and more while keeping that bass steady.
If you have completed the Intermediate course, the Advanced course is next up!
All of these courses show your preview videos on the product page - so you can actually see what you are going to master if you just put in the 15 minutes a day.
All courses come with a 30 day moneyback gaurantee as well. If you're not happy, you'll get a refund, no questions asked.
Yes.
Over 30k students have done these courses with a 4.6/5 rating (from over 2k students leaving reviews). They are now active fingerpicking guitarists, just like you will soon be!
If the course isn't to your liking, there is a full moneyback gaurantee
Read my article about Setting a guitar goal and choose which of these performance videos represents how good you want to be.
Each of these will indicate what level this is and purchasing the course of that level will get you as good as this or your money back.