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The guitar is one of the most versatile instruments we can use in songwriting, capable of a whole spectrum of sounds. Fingerpicking a guitar, though, is often overlooked by the average composer, and yet it appears in beginning guitar books. With a few simple guitar exercises, though, you should soon be able to work this method into your tunesmithing arsenal. Here are some fun music writing tips we songwriters can use to sneak a little fingerstyle guitar into our compositions, and dissolve a few myths about how difficult a technique it is.
If you can fret chords, you can play fingerstyle guitar. You can often tell who the fingerpickers are by noting how they keep their fingernails long on their picking hand, and cut to nubs on their fretting hand. True, you can just pick with fingertips at first, or even buy the picks that fit onto each finger-experiment to see which you like more, but most of us find you get a cleaner, crisper sound if you can put the proper pressure on strings and pluck them with something pick-like you won't lose in the middle of a song. If you have a habit of not firmly gripping your strings, though, and play with a lot of muted strings and distortion, you have a little working out to do. Some guitarists build up their fret hand strength by squeezing a tennis ball, but even just making a fist and releasing it repeatedly can help build up your gripping strength. Practice proper finger placement until you can hear notes cleanly. While you are at it, too, drill yourself on releasing strings cleanly and moving to the next chord with plenty of clearance over the strings, and you won't get that obnoxious squeaking sound that happens when you don't do it right. Find a song you like to play that has few chords that you would normally strum, and practice arpeggiating the chord in several different ways in the same rhythm figure, and have fun playing with the sequence you hit each note in while running through the song several times. Change the tempo and genre the song is usually played in, and even pull out one of those fun rhythm books and try a few intervals you might not have thought up yourself. Many awards have been won over the years when someone dared to take a raucous hit and tone it down into a fingerstyle ballad. If nothing else, it should bring a few giggles as you admit a bit of guilty pleasure in desecrating some overblown heavy metal or disco sacred cow by turning it into something pretty and delicate.
The copyright of the article Fingerpicking Fun in Writing Music is owned by Cindy Lee Haddock. Permission to republish Fingerpicking Fun in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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