Beginning Fingerpicking Solos

Lessons

• Lesson 1: Grandfather's Clock - Fingerpicking Solo

  This is a lesson on creating and arranging a basic melody into a solo fingerpicking piece. It starts with just the melody, then goes into how to harmonize it yourself. Next is a short set of fingerpicking exercises, basically a short course in patterns and technique, followed by putting everything together in a simple manner before syncopating the melody to make it musical.

• Lesson 2: Freight Train

  Elizabeth Cotten wrote Freight Train when she was 12 years old. It is now a fingerpicking standard and a great place to start learning the alternating bass technique.

• Lesson 3: Billie's Blues - Neil Hogan

  Billie's Blues is a short 12-bar exercise that Neil put together using a syncopated bass line and a few standard blues fills in the styles of Robert Johnson and Big Bill Broonzy. Feel free to change it around anyway you like and make it your own.

• Lesson 4: Amazing Grace (Slide Guitar)

  This arrangement of Amazing Grace includes playing the melody with a slide or bottleneck. The lesson goes over some basic slide techniques as well as some of the different types of slides available.

• Lesson 5: Monday - Neil Hogan

  Today we introduce the 1st in a series of easy fingerpicking songs that Neil wrote as exercises similar to Shades Of Funk and Billies Blues. We start with Monday, a song in a style he calls back porch music in the key of C. There are more of these in the pipeline, many use a standard songwriting form known as AABA.

• Lesson 6: Tuesday - Neil Hogan

  Tuesday is the 2nd in a series of easy fingerpicking songs that Neil wrote as exercises similar to Shades Of Funk and Billie's Blues. We started with Monday, a song in a style he calls back porch music in the key of C. There are more of these in the pipeline, many use a standard songwriting form known as AABA.

• Lesson 7: Shades Of Funk

  Shades of Funk is one of the 1st fingerpicking pieces I learned. I have been teaching it to students for over 30 years. It is a great tune to start working on the technique of combining a melody with alternating bass notes.

• Lesson 8: The Wings by Gustavo Santaolalla - Guitar Lesson

  Gustavo Santaolalla is a musician, film composer and producer from Argentina. He has won Academy Awards for Best Original Score in two consecutive years, for Brokeback Mountain in 2005, and Babel in 2006.
  
  The Wings is taken from the Brokeback Mountain score and appears at the end of the movie.
  
  It’s a beautiful instrumental with only four chords, which Santaolalla plays on the guitar.
  
  The arrangement features a little bit of everything. Picking, strumming and a combination of both. The challenge is to keep that going and to focus on the melody, as well as changing chords smoothly.