I love playing fingerstyle guitar, and have worked hard at learning a few Tommy pieces, the John Standafer version of " A Man of Constant Sorrow", Windy and Warm, Borsalino, etc. However I am stuck a bit now and would really appreciate hearing your opinions of what a good roster of tunes would be for a well exposed fingerstyle guitarist to know. I have been playing for many years and really love learning new songs.

Let me know your favorite songs? I would really appreciate it.

Thanks

Joe

Just a thought - wander over to www.michaelawong.com and listen to some of his tunes - some good candidates there.

Maybe this would be too easy for you, but I have found Chet Atkin's Vincent to be challenging.

Peace,
Rip

Jerry Reed recorded some cool fingerpicking instrumentals. Here on the Forum, watch the videos by Maplebaby--he's a good finger style player.

Hi. I'm a fingerstyle guy most of the time, and I would suggest a coupla books from a guy named Mark Hanson who has this outfit called Accent On Music. Look him up on the web.

1. Slack Key book -- This book, which transcribes some of the tunes from the Hawaiian Slack Key Guitar tradition, has some easily reachable and beautiful tunes. These are all in altered tunings, and the ones in Open G are really nice. If you have never heard this style, see what you can do to hear Dream Slack Key by a guy named Sonny Chillingworth. Very nice tune and easy enough to play. Whenever I play this, people think it sounds really cool. There are also several other tunes in here that are reachable, sound great, and are fun to play. Excellent stuff here.

2. Hymns and Spirituals for Fingerstyle Guitar. -- with this book, there are some really nice arrangements of traditional pieces, but there are two that are very noteworthy and they are the ones in DADGAD. One is Brother James Air and I forget the name of the other tune, but it is beautiful. Sounds sort of celtic and these two arrangements are just fab -- worth the price of the book for those two things. Also in this book is cool Drop-D version of Down to the River to Pray which is blues and cool. Great stuff!

Hope this helps. I think Hanson's stuff is some of the very best fingerstyle stuff available -- the music is clear, the tab is spot on, the recordings really play the tunes exactly as written -- they are great -- well worth the money, and each book is something like $20 each which is nothing compared to the price of a good lesson. I have no real connection to Hanson except I've bought nearly everything he's ever put out, so no financial ties here! Also, he plays a Collings SJ. I took a workshop from him one time in Minneapolis where I live, and it was really fun.

Best of luck to you!

I suggest Beatles tunes as a repertoire builder. Also some Ellington standards.

I develop my own arrangements though, and recommend the same approach for this type of stuff rather than the painstaking (to me) process of learning someone else's note for note. There are plenty of chord progression sites on the web, almost all of them with chord choices that are occasionally questionable (ie erroneous) so caveat emptor.

Key choices are important, should go without saying but there it is...

I think every fingerstylist should have Michelle (I do it in D) and Yesterday (F, as it was written)as baseline pieces. There's a lot of their stuff that workd really well in A - and can be "bluesed up" quite well, which adds feeling to make up for the loss of vocals. Examples are You Can't Do That, Hard Days Night,Can't Buy me Love (which I do as a medley along with a few others I can throw in). Here Comes the Sun is really easy in D - it's almost a cliche but it's fun to play if you're in the mood (and btw segues nicely into a bunch of Cat Stevens things which seem to have been written by fooling around with his fingers in first position chords, kind of like the open tuning guys do with walks up and down the neck, but WTH they can work well as solo fingerstyle and aren't too hard unless you want them to be). In G the clear choice is In My Life, which I slide into after I Will (another example of the classic G Em Am D, I vi ii V progression with an easy to id bridge that shows that the Lads actually studied classic pop music rather than re-invent the wheel). Lately I've been working up For No One. As a hint, if you can play While My Guitar Gently (Am obviously) you can get there too.

Once you get 'em in the obvious keys, try transposing them!

If you like C major (and who doesn't??) Ellington was a piano player, as I recall. Good easy first pieces are Solitude, Mood Indigo and Take the A Train, which also makes a nice medley.

Then there's Monk, which is more challenging. Not so much the progressions and "melody" but capturing the rhythmic angularities, use of whole tone scales, etc. Best played "rubato", and can take a lot of listens to a favorite version (try his spare solo or trio stuff) before you catch the flavor. Lifetime study, that.

Well, there's a ton more, like Cole Porter, Jerome Kern, Gershwin etc - "the great American Songbook". Many lifetimes. Oh, Over the Rainbow is very accessible.

Wish you were near Austin Joe! We could "talk"!

Would love to hear your stuff!

Best wishes, Mark.

Mark: wow. your libretto and mine overlap a whole lot. kinda scary, actually. I also like Here there and Everywhere, in G. That bridge! How in the world did those guys think of that stuff. You can't guess with them- or Monk, or Joni. I also learned, and hope to continue learning, by going way back to the roots of popular American music. Louis Armstrong, Bix Biederbeck, Ellington, Basie, Ella, billie, Sinatra. Horn players- wow. Some wise gentlemen told me 25 years ago to listen to horn players, but I'm too thick headed to pick that up. So it took me ten years to get around to it. West End Blues (Armstrong's Hot Five) and swinging the blues (Biederbeck) have taught me as much as Robert Johnson and Son House and T Bone Walker. Have we picked a great instrument, or what!? There is no end, only a series of beginnings. Now I have to go play. Have to. Maybe ST. James Infirmary, then Georgia on My Mind, then Ipanema, then some originals. God, I love this stuff. tom

Some of my favorites would be:

Freight Train by Elizabeth Cotten
David Bromberg's versions of Delia,Chump Man Blues
Any arrangement of Bach's Sheep May Safely Graze
William Ackermans The Bricklayers Beautiful Daughter
All My Lovin-Beatles
The Andy Griffith Theme
Take Me Out To The Ballgame-my version
Ashokan Farewell-I play it in A or is it D ?
Almost any Leon Redbone arrangement, I like Lazybones
Doc Watson-Deep River Blues
Jorma Kaukonen-Embryonic Journey and I love his Hot Tuna version of Hesitation Blues
Getcha some Merle and Chit and Mark Knopfler
Pierre Bensusan...all the early Rounder stuff pick a song any song

Uh-oh.... times up

quote:

Originally posted by cowboycamper:

Ashokan Farewell-I play it in A or is it D ?

Almost any Leon Redbone arrangement

Getcha some Chet and Mark Knopfler

CC: I like it in D but that's where I learned it.

Ain't misbehaving- Leon

Poor boy blues- Chet and Mark

Tom (Sonoman), I've noticed from your posts that your musical taste and mine do indeed overlap quite a bit. There are a few others on this forum too, not naming names...

Again, I think learning/arranging solo acoustic Beatles is a really good way to make the bridge (yes, pun intended, others coming) between 3 and 4 chord folk based music and American Songbook composed tunes, if one is wont to go that way. Problem for most, moi non plus, is it takes work, and more on the dreaded "theory" side of things than from "monkey hear/monkey play". And...apologies to all the offended monkeys out there who are making great sounds but can't quite yet chord melody Good Bye Porkpie Hat... . Of course, not everyone might care to, but if ya did....anyway it ain't easy even if you do know what sense those chords make. Still workin' on it myself. Lifelong endeavor, the 6 string. BTW I'll second the horn player thing and raise you a piano player or 2. Checked out Professor Longhair style NO blues/funk on fingerstyle 6? Can it actually be done??

I suspect that if one used the phrase "principles of music" rather than "theory" maybe more people would evolve more quicker. Or not...

Those Liverpudlians surely did have a way with melody and lyrics laid over some fairly common pop progression types. The more I play 'em the more I appreciate what they did, and why they were so doggone popular - well they did hairstyle and sung pretty well too... And as for the bridge of In My Life, well as I hear it they either studied some JS Bach at Art School or got it off George Martin, which is where I'd bet my coppers. I really love the way L. Juber plays that tune, and his whole album of Beatles covers - even though they're all in DADgum I think! He sure can get into and past that tuning and into the music. Somewhere he credits his classical training and it really shines on that bridge. Reminiscent of the Pachelbel Can(n)on too, if/when flatpicked on a D1A?! (warned you)

Well, before I rival your 3K+ posts all in my one, let me just throw in for fellow Texan El Jefe and CCamper (who lists some great stuff!), that Ashokan Farewell is really nice and sonorous, and falls under the fingers well, when done in G major, with the lead-in walked up on the high e string from D to G (the "big G") . One also needs, of course, Em, Am(7) and C. Starts to get like Canon and suddenly Scarborough Fair etc. Then you think I vi ii V is running through all this and you're back to In My Life, eh?

Anyway, hopefully this thread is obscure enough that I won't get too scorched for my indiscretions, and if I do, heck it's so hot in Texas who can tell the dif? You'd think varnish would dry quicker. Oh yeah, they build 'em indoors...

Oh yes, Tom, I really don't know what's up with your CJ but I sincerely hope it shows up soon and reduces the Alien to 2nd best. A very close 2nd best....

Regards, Mark.

PS I Love You Beatles, don't forget the minor iii . And then there's Jobim! ML.

If I may chime in....

Beatles, for sure. Davy Graham and his fingerstyle anthem "Anji" (Paul Simon does a nice version). Graham also does a handsome version of Take 5. All of John Renbourn, especially "English Dance" (superb), "Pelican", and the jazz-tinged "Little Niles". Pierre Bensusan. Especially his first album "Pres de Paris" which, IMO, is the single finest acoustic fingerstyle album extant. Pure Juice. His "Guitar Book of Pierre Bensusan" has, if I recall, over 200 pages of accurate tab. $20 or so. Keeping in the European spehere you may profitably look into Bert Jansch, Nic Jones, Steve Tilston, Martin Simpson, L. Juber et al.

Stateside, besides the usual suspects such as Doc Watson, Leo Kottke, Simon+G, Duck Baker, Michael Hedges, the Narada and Windham Hill bunch, and a thousand more, one I like is Joe Miller (check his "Ivory Coast").

I can go on for pages but better stop here with some must-know recommendations: English Dance, Anji, Pierre Bensusan's "Merrily Kissed the Quaker", Windy and Warm, Deep River Blues, Chet Atkins version of Freight Train. Better stop.

If you're up to it I have done arrangements of the classic fingerstyle pieces "Freight Train" and "Deep River Blues":


Power Tab and PDF formats

http://dcoombsguitar.com/Guitar%20Music/Lessons/FreightTrain.pdf
http://dcoombsguitar.com/Guitar%20Music/Lessons/FreightTrain.ptb

http://dcoombsguitar.com/Guitar%20Music/Lessons/DeepRiverBlues.pdf
http://dcoombsguitar.com/Guitar%20Music/Lessons/DeepRiverBlues.ptb

Rick