Fingerpicking good! (guitar playing for beginners)

Fingerpicking techniques 1

Fingerpicking for guitar

One of the reasons I bought the Tanglewood TRF is that the guitar is perfectly shaped for fingerpicking. The TRF has no pickguard but as I'm still totally unexperienced with strumming techniques, for now it'a not a problem. At first I want to learn how to play folk and blues, and learn different styles of fingerpicking. Lots of methods and courses for learning fingerpicking can be found on the internet, but the good ones are hard to find. I did my search for guitar fingerpicking techniques. Here's were I started!

Fingerpicking techniques for the acoustic guitar

Fingerpicking techniques 2

About 30 years ago the Dutch / Indonesian writer
Alfred Birney wrote an introduction in fingerpicking techniques for the guitar, introducing a notation system which combined notes and tabs. His method is still used by many guitar teachers. The 2 books however can not be ordered anymore.

The method is an introduction on fingerpicking techniques for folk, blues and ragtime. It covers the basics as well as the English folk style and the American folk, ragtime and blues. Although the books are written in Dutch, I think they can be very useful for everybody who wants a tool to learn the basics of fingerpicking. An explanation on how to read tabs can easily be found on the net, and the chords used can be found on the last pages in the books.

Best of all, the author offers the fingerpicking techniques for the acoustic guitar in pdf on his website for free!   Just click on the covers on his site,
they will open in PDF. Check them out!