Audio clip #1: Tune up

When guitarists are introduced to playing fingerstyle, a certain bewilderment can set in. "You mean I have to sing, change chords, move my thumb back and forth in rhythmically appropriate ways on the bottom three strings of the guitar, and move two or three fingers on the upper strings in a melodically pleasing manner? How am I supposed to learn and coordinate all of these activities? That’s at least four different things to think about, right?"

Put aside the confusion that is always rampant when learning a new skill and imagine yourself watching a skillful motorist driving a car with a standard transmission. You’re 14 years old, and nothing ever seemed cooler or more unlikely than learning how to drive a standard—your left foot in charge of the clutch but coordinated with your right foot, which has to figure out when to go from gas to brake at the correct time for your right hand, which has to navigate that intricate little diagram on top of the gearshift knob, while your left hand steers the car and your head and eyes make decisions about how fast, what lane, what direction, and so on. Broken down in that manner, driving sounds like a hopelessly complex skill, and it probably seemed so when you were 14.

But what happened? You practiced. You stalled the car a couple of times, but within six months you were not only performing all of the skills flawlessly, but you were balancing a drink in your lap and messing with the cassette player or hunting for acoustic music somewhere in FM land. Best of all, and most significantly for you budding fingerstylists, you actually became a much better driver once you got skillful enough that you no longer needed to think about what you were doing. When you ceased to be preoccupied with learning these new functions assigned to various body parts and they became motor skills, you were free to think about other routes to your destination, traffic, your speed, and possible dangers to your vehicle, and when you did so, your driving improved markedly.

So it is with your hands and fingers in fingerstyle guitar playing. First you will need to put some intensive time into teaching your right hand the different functions required of it, so that you can later rely on it to take care of itself while you focus your attention elsewhere—on your singing, on intricate left-hand fingering, or on the feeling you wish to communicate with your music.