Just last year was out my book/cd Basic Fingerstyle – A Collection of Easy Tunes for Acoustic Guitar published by Carisch. So, after this time, I would like to thanks all the fans enthusiastic of this collection. The following notes are my thinking about this project, distinctions and explanations about terms we use frequently. Including to this article you will find an arpeggio from Basic Fingerstyle. I recommend to read the suggestions at the end of the page before playing. Have a good reading and good playing!

Why An Easy Tunes Collection?

It is hoped that those who are taking their first steps in fingerstyle will start by encountering easy exercises and tunes. In fact, many students are attracted by difficult pieces, because in most cases they are more interesting musically. But this tendancy can often lead to discouragement, because the necessary experience for such pieces is lacking. As a teacher, I always suggest a series of tunes which will build a solid base, on which to develop the subsequent steps. But I have also discovered how difficult it can be to locate easy tunes which are also enjoyable to play. Harder still was finding a single book which combined all of these features. So, in order to even partially fulfill the expectations of my students and myself, I was forced to search out musical notations and tablatures from many different publications. But varying symbols, missing fingerings and lack of audio supports, persuaded me of the need to start working on this project: a basic collection of stimulating pieces for a first repertoire, capable of developing a satisfying fluency of execution within a reasonable time and without a loss of enthusiasm. This was my aim and I hope I have, in part at least, achieved it.

Acoustic Guitar and Classical Guitar

This collection, even if dedicated to the acoustic guitar, is undoubtedly useful for classical guitarists too. We know how these two instruments differ in size and sound. The classical guitar, with nylon strings, has a wider fretboard and different string spacing. The acoustic guitar has steel strings, a narrower fretboard and requires stronger nails. Expert guitarists can use both instruments to play different repertoires, producing a different sound for different situations. But, at the beginning of the learning process, it is probably better to choose the right guitar for our needs, because changing an instrument requires time and familiarity with all the different features. It will also involve consulting a luthier, to check the intonation and the action of the strings: very important points if we are to have maximum satisfaction with our instrument.

Terms and Meanings in the Face: From Fingerpicking to Basic Fingerstyle

Fingerpicking was born as the most suitable sort of guitar technique for playing North American blues and folk. So for many years it has been associated with this kind of traditional music. The term fingerstyle has a more recent origin, referring to the use of the right hand fingers generally, and for this reason it is often combined with another word describing the musical genre: so we often talk about classic fingerstyle, fingerstyle jazz or celtic fingerstyle. Fingerstyle blues, for example, has a lot in common with fingerpicking, but more frequently it’s used predominantly for contemporary blues and new arrangements of old blues: it’s not really the same as the original ones which are part of traditional fingerpicking. Such details apart, early bluesmen, using the alternating bass, ostinato and walking bass, introduced an important element in the art of using the fingers of the right hand: the rhythm. More than a polyphonic technique that plays melody and bass at the same time, it also has the peculiarity of being polyrhythmic, thus producing different accents in each of the lines. For this reason generations of guitarists have successfully used and evolved this technique for other kinds of music. Basic Fingerstyle, far from expressing a musical genre, establishes a connection between easy tunes and fingerstyle. But because we are mainly interested in acoustic guitar, a significant part of this collection comes from traditional music, which, after all, turns out to be the best repertoire for a basic instructional training.

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