Beginners Guitar Fingerpicking
From Zero to Guitar Fingerpicker in 30 days
Learning guitar is not just as simple as putting the time in.
Here are some of the things that people tell me when I ask about their guitar progress:
- “I spent 6 months trying to learn chords and play along to my favorite song. Every time I play with my friend, his playing sounds awesome and mine still sounds lame”.
- “I have found hundreds of guitar lessons on YouTube but when the material gets hard, I just can't keep up.
- “I spent 20 hours trying to figure out how my favorite guitarist plays but I can still play a couple of bars at most and that time wasn’t really well spent”.
What Most People Try
Bad Advice #1: Learn as many chords and scales as you can and keep practicing until you sound good.
“It's all about putting the time in!”
Reality: It is not easy to learn some chords and scales and suddenly sound good. You need to get musical reward from playing - particularly in those first few hours of guitar or first few hours of a new technique. That's how you stay engaged.
Bad Advice #2: Browse random guitar tutorial videos on YouTube that have no structured component to learning.
“The more lessons I do, the better I will become"
Reality: Putting the time into practicing is important, but it’s vital to make sure you are practicing the right thing. Perfect practice gives you great results. Bad practice teaches you bad habits. It's about mastering the guitar rather than just noodling around.
How To Turbocharge Your Guitar Progress
When I teach guitar with students one-on-one, we identify a song that they are super excited to be able to play perfectly - and I make sure they have a structured path to every technique and skill they need to play that song successfully.
And you know what happens?
After 30 days, they can play other pieces they wouldn’t even have dreamed about playing 6 months ago.
From Zero to Guitar Fingerpicker
Why this course works better than any other
This is NOT an online guitar course that teaches you a few chords and how to play "Mary had a little lamb".
This is a 4-week program that teaches you all the basics you need to be a guitar player - fingerpicking from the very start. You will sound musical even during the first lesson. I teach you how to read tab, play to a metronome and create your own fingerpicking compositions - literally everything you need (even if you don't know what these things are yet!).
You’ll be able to apply the right fingerpicking techniques to guitar and play fingerpicking pieces by Simon & Garfunkel, Jeff Buckley, Ray LaMontagne and REM.
Why this works
Students that learn guitar by fingerpicking first have the highest rate of learning success. This course gives you the structure to learning fingerpicking from the beginning. This is the fastest, stickiest, most fun way of learning guitar because the fingerpicking approach means that you will:
- Be musical after a couple of hours (instead of strumming the crap out of your guitar strings and your wife asking for a divorce!)
- Be able to apply your own taste and choices to what you play and get instant feedback
- Learn a way of playing multiple parts on one instrument which means you don’t need other musicians to create a full musical performance.
Detailed Product Description
The academy offers you a structured learning scaffold that makes you better each day. So you sound musical from day 1 and achieve rewarding progress each day.
Each lesson consists of:
- High-definition professionally recorded instruction videos (using 3 cameras to illustrate the right hand, left hand and portrait view of the teacher)
- A lesson PDF including technique descriptions and the guitar tablature for all exercises
- Helpful hints for nailing the last exercise if you found it a challenge
The course also gives you:
- A cheat sheet which tells you which fingerpicking patterns work over each chord!
- Video feedback from me personally when you are halfway through the course. This will help me diagnose a few areas of improvement for you outside the course material
Have you ever dreamed of playing guitar or even started but then faded away after a while? Do you think it's going to be years of practice before you sound good? Would you be excited if I told you you didn't have to just play boring chords for the first six months - you could actually be fingerpicking within 30 days?
Over the years, I have experimented and realised that there is a way to teach students that seems like starting with what many would believe to be a 'complex' or 'advanced' style - fingerpicking using the thumb and three fingers - is actually the best way for a complete beginner to learn.
There is good reason for this. The traditional method of learning chords and strumming them is relatively easy to do, but actually surprisingly hard to do well. Listen to any beginner strum a set of chords and you see it is hard for the beginner to sound musical after a couple of days. But if you start picking strings individually, then after 4 or 5 days, you can play some really nice pieces. And this is the key: rewarding the student from day one, enabling them to sound musical within the first week. Believe me, I have seen this work time and time again.
When you want to learn the guitar, it matters hugely which course and teacher you pick. The cost of getting this wrong isn't that you lose out on $30-50, it is that the teaching may not stick for you and you may end up with a life where you never learn guitar, rather a life where picking up the guitar is a huge joy and pleasure for you, whether just on your own or playing with other musicians.
For a complete beginner, there is no more effective and no more enjoyable, musical and confidence building way than to start with a couple of chords and a fingerpicking technique.
At the end of my course, you will be able to...
- play bass patterns over the most common chords
- play scales
- understand how to construct melodies
- learn the fundamentals of reading rhythm
- weave hammer-ons and pull-offs into your melody lines
- develop a completely independent left and right hand
- play the boom-chuck pattern
- play several advanced fingerpicking pieces
- learn how to fingerpick a 12-bar blues in E