Hi Lee,
I play classical and folk nylon-string guitar. I learned 40 years ago to use my right-hand fingers and thumb to play the pieces and have never used a pick. As I work through your book I have tried to mark the Exercise notes with right-hand fingering as one does with classical pieces but I am finding that awkward, especially on the shifts. I have also tried using just my thumbnail on all the strings and it feels a bit strange. It’s fun to be able to use the minor Pentatonic scale to improvise over your jam tracks but awkward for me at these fast tempos. Do you have any recommendations for players like me? Thanks so much for your help on this matter.
It shouldn’t be a problem, you just need to find a way to adapt things to suit your fingering. I personally use right hand fingers and or thumb sometimes. Mark Knopfler plays his Strat with thumb and forefinger, if I recall correctly, Wes Montgomery – thumb and many others I can’t right now think of, play without a pick.
Advice? I’m not sure, it’s not something I’ve given any real thought to. You could use more hammer-ons, pull-offs and legato slides in phrases that your fingers can’t move fast enough. Scales and phrases don’t need to be played verbatim, especially when improvising so experiment to make things work around your finger picking method.
With a thumb and one or two fingers you should be able to get by quite well, just keep practicing and experimenting – don’t worry so much about what you can’t do, instead look for things that you can and work with those, after a while you’ll just get better at it.
Thanks. I knew about Jeff Beck (I think he uses pick as well sometimes) but didn’t know about Lindsey Buckingham.
FYI, here are are a couple more interesting “no-pick” players of renown: Lindsey Buckingham (Fleetwood Mac) plays both acoustic and electric fingerstyle. The English guitarist Jeff Beck plays electric guitar almost entirely with his thumb.