Fingerpicking with Tommy Emmanuel

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as any listener to his latest album' The MYstery\Fa' first love: fingerstyle acoustic playing. The results have been awe-inspiring, pop, derivered with crystailine tone and impeccabre fork, and country of brend tastefur ;.."nue1s ;J;;#5;;ii,;;;. him for Best Country !nstrumental Perforyear;they nominated technique, certainly caught the attention of Grammy voters this and a Merle Travis classic that shows off both composltion original an of medley Rag," a Rag/Cannonball mance on "Gameshow melodv' the guitarist's fiendish speed and his knack for writing an unshakable

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Of course, it's one thing to think like a band and quite another to actually play like onHetting the fingers of your picking hand to work independently the way Emmanuel's do takes major time and practice. But You've got to start somewhere, and it's always best to staft with

the basics. ln this exclusive lesson, Emmanuel takes us

through a fingerstyle Pattern from the bottom up and demonstrates a few key techniques that add dazzle to his six-string feats of prestidigitation. So what does a guitarist need to do to play fingerstyle wellT First, concentrate on the thumb. The thumb plays what the left hand on the piano would play. lt does all the accompaniment. And if you want to play fingerstyle properly, you've reallY got to make Your thumb independent and get it to take

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care of all the backing so the melody and harmony can be taken care of by the fingers. What's the first step toward doing that? SteP one is to play with your thumb bY itself. Put all your pick-hand

fingers down on the face of the guitar. Mute the strings slightly with your palm; that way, the bass notes are in their own little Pocket, and. when it comes time to bring in a melody over them, they wonl be ringing too loud. Then you play something like this IFig. 1], which is all downstrokes with the thumb, starting every measure with the root note of the chord.

And step two? KeeP that bass going with the thumb and bring in the fingers to play chords at the beginning of each measure [Fig.2]. But step three is where You really come to the crossroads: Put in another chord accent

with your fingers between the thumb strokes IFig.3l. You're going to feel the Pull here, because your fingers will want to follow your thumb and vice versa, but after a while they'll get used to working independentlY. Where to from there? The next step is to play arpeg-

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