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You can learn to play music using a variety of resources including teachers, online resources, and books.
Mark Hanson’s The Art of Solo Fingerpicking is a serious method book aimed at intermediate and advanced guitar players who want to expand upon their knowledge of playing solo fingerstyle guitar arrangements utilizing alternating bass (or Travis Picking). This might be the book for you if you have some experience playing fingerstyle and you want to learn some more advanced concepts and take things to another level. Do not buy this book if you are just beginning with fingerstyle guitar.
1) The book expands on basic alternate-bass driven solo arrangements with lessons on how to create variations in your picking patterns, how to use chord inversions to modify your bass lines, how to play in alternate time signatures, how to add picking hand rolls to your picking patterns, how to use fretting and picking hand damping, and how to gain speed.
2) Excellent info on picking hand positions and technique. More detail than almost any book I’ve seen.
3) After presenting a concept there is always a song that utilizes that concept. This immediate application is satisfying and makes the book feel cohesive.
4) Great repertoire. Mostly the author’s original songs or arrangements. No famous songs that you’ve heard on the radio, but the included songs are legitimately catchy, dynamic, and stylistically varied (within the umbrella of the alternating-bass style).
5) High quality audio access is included.
The book does not discuss arranging for fingerstyle guitar (taking a tune or melody and creating a solo fingerstyle arrangement/version). It also doesn’t get into the modern percussive techniques used by modern players like Michael Hedges, Don Ross, Andy McKee, Mike Dawes, etc. No thumb slaps, guitar body percussion, or tapping.
I recommend using an acoustic steel string guitar rather than a classical guitar since there are multiple tunes that utilize the fretting hand thumb over the top.
Published by Accent on Music and Mark Hanson. Original © 1988. Distributed by Hal Leonard.
eBook: Arranging for Fingerstyle Guitar: go to http://joemcmurray.com/checkout/ to purchase a pdf of my eBook.
Riding the Wave: my second fingerstyle guitar album is available on all streaming platforms.
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