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You can learn to play music using a variety of resources including teachers, online resources, and books.
Hal Leonard’s “Fingerstyle Guitar” is a solid method book aimed at beginner, intermediate, and advanced guitar players who want to learn to play solo fingerstyle guitar arrangements complete with melody, bass lines, and inner harmony. It also has a chapter focused on accompaniment styles for those players looking to play fingerstyle guitar and sing (or accompany another melody instrument. This book ranges in difficulty from easy to hard, often within each chapter.
1) Good information about choosing an acoustic guitar and other gear.
2) Good fingerstyle arpeggiation and alternating bass patterns followed by musical application of those patterns. Unfortunately, the musical applications are often disconnected from each other (they don’t build on each other and there isn’t much explanation).
3) Introduces all the elements of playing fingerstyle guitar. Melody, bass, inner harmony, arpeggiation, alternating bass, special techniques, introduction to alternate tunings.
4) Probably the best popular repertoire of any method book on the market. Hal Leonard presents popular tunes from the Beatles, Bob Dylan, James Taylor, etc. You could buy the book just for the repertoire.
5) Wonderful chapter on arranging for fingerstyle guitar.
6) Audio Access included.
Personally, I don’t like how the book teaches alternate tunings. It basically gives you a bunch of chord charts and a few examples for Open G tuning. They do a slightly better job of discussing Drop D tuning. It would have been nice if they had arranged “Silent Night” (the focus of Chapter 4) in each of these tunings so that you got a sense of why you might want to use them. Obviously, each alternate tuning causes the melody to lay out differently on the fretboard, and each alt tuning gives you different access to bass notes, inner harmony, harmonics, etc.
Although the book does introduce percussive string slaps, for the most part it does not get into the modern percussive techniques used by modern players like Michael Hedges, Don Ross, Andy McKee, Mike Dawes, etc. No guitar body percussion or tapping.
Hal Leonard’s “Fingerstyle Guitar” covers a lot of ground and you could return to it for years. You could buy it just for the great repertoire. However, as a method book, I’d first recommend Alfred’s “Beginning Fingerstyle Guitar Method, and if you are into the alternate bass style then maybe Mel Bay’s “Chet Atkins Guitar Method.”
Acoustic steel string or classical nylon string guitar. Published by Hal Leonard, written by Chad Johnson. © 2009
eBook: Arranging for Fingerstyle Guitar: purchase a pdf of my eBook at http://joemcmurray.com/index.php/checkout/
Riding the Wave: my second fingerstyle guitar album is available on all streaming platforms including Spotify and Apple Music.
