Easy Fingerpicking Guitar: A Beginner's Guide to Essential Patterns & Techniques

Finger picking freaks some beginning guitarists out. It can seem so complicated and involved and it's easy to hear an accomplished player performing some finger style wizardry and think that you'll never even begin to sound that good.Fortunately, Andrew DuBrock's latest guitar tutorial book, Easy Fingerpicking Guitar - A Beginner's Guide to Essential Patterns & Techniques, does a thorough job of giving the beginning guitarist the necessary basics to start exploring all the possibilities of finger style guitar.Each step of basic fingerpicking is presented in a simple sequence. You begin by getting your thumb to serve as your bass player, picking out the notes on the three low strings. Then Andrew gets you to add in your index finger and to have both the thumb and the index finger work in tandem. Once you are confident that you can use your thumb and index finger on various chords that involve playing different combinations, he then teaches you how to add in your middle finger (working solely with the thumb) and then the ring finger (again, just with the thumb to start with).Next, Andrew guides you through is using various combinations of fingers in conjunction with the thumb. Before you know it you are employing all your fingers to create some simple (and beautiful!) finger picking. He also introduces you to alternating bass patterns and discusses how to adapt your finger picking patterns to bring out the tonal highlights of different chords.You may consider Easy Fingerpicking Guitar a "prequel" to Andrew's excellent book on Travis Picking. After going through Easy Fingerpicking Guitar you'll be more than prepared to tackle on Travis picking or any of the many fingerstyle songs you've been hoping to play.Peace

This book is designed for the absolute beginner. It builds fingerpicking skills very gradually. It teaches a lot of important open chords and introduces songs pretty quickly so students can put to use what they are learning. It can be used by motivated beginners without a teacher or makes an excellent book for teachers who are teaching rank beginners. If you've got some knowledge of and experience fingerpicking, or your students do, this book probably isn't quite right. It's just way too basic.

I purchased a couple of beginner books to teach myself fingerstyle guitar, and I liked this one the best. I starts with the baiscs and then slowly builds by adding more fingers to the exercises. I listened to the CD at the beginning of each exercise to get the idea of what I suppose to sound like, and then after quite a bit of self-paced practice, I would try to play along with the CD. It took me about two months to become somewhat proficient with the exercises while practicing about an hour each evening. I already knew the necessary guitar chords, so I focused mostly on right-hand technique - p-i-m-a.

An excellent book for beginners. This book is absolutely wonderful for those wanting to learn how to play fingerstyle guitar. It is well written, clear, and well organized. To facilitate learning this style of guitar, it is helpful to know approximately 10 open chords. If not, this book will also teach a person the basic open chords. This book is a MUST for any person interested in learning fingerpicking.

Very basic to intermediate! Great addition to my library for learning!

This book has been fun to play through. Heads up, it's for complete beginners.

I play guitar and I'm still trying to figure out this book. Not real happy.

Easy is the key word. Very beginner easy. There are only 2 songs to learn in the entire manual, along with a few chords. If you already know some basic chords, look for another picking manual. You can fined everything here on a You Tube video.

Fair.

The media could not be loaded.  I’m amazed more people haven’t commented on this... I’ve only found one review on Amazon.com where someone else has noticed this.All over this book, are rhythms that do not fit into the bars they are placed in. There’s an appendix which gives a brief lesson in rhythm reading... it gives correct information and examples on how to count rhythm, however this information is then completely contradicted throughout the rest of the book... I can’t imagine being completely new to reading music, stumbling upon this book, and trying to wrap my head around it...

Quite an easy book for beginners. Good to practise with the audio as backing track.

A little too basic for m’y skill level.