Fingerstyle guitar
Fingerings for both hands are often given in detail in classical guitar music notation, although players are also free to add to or depart from them as part of their own interpretation.
To achieve tremolo effects and rapid, fluent scale passages, and varied arpeggios the player must practice alternation, that is, never plucking a string with the same finger twice.
Factors include: Concert guitarists must keep their fingernails smoothly filed and carefully shaped[7] to employ this technique, which produces a better-controlled sound than either nails or fingertips alone.
Some specialized techniques include: Bossa nova is most commonly performed on the nylon-string classical guitar, played with the fingers rather than with a pick.
It falls under the "fingerstyle" heading because it is plucked by the fingers, but it is generally used to play a specific type of folk, country-jazz and/or blues music.
[8] Some early blues players such as Blind Willie Johnson and Tampa Red added slide guitar techniques.
A year later Grossman and ED Denson founded Kicking Mule Records, a company that recorded scores of LPs of solo ragtime guitar by artists including Grossman, Ton van Bergeyk, Leo Wijnkamp, Duck Baker, Peter Finger, Lasse Johansson, Tom Ball and Dale Miller.
[15] The most common pattern, sometimes broadly referred to as Travis picking after Merle Travis, and popularized by Chet Atkins, Scotty Moore, James Burton, Marcel Dadi, James Taylor,[16] John Prine, Colter Wall and Tommy Emmanuel, is as follows: The thumb (T) alternates between bass notes, often on two different strings, while the index (I) and middle (M) fingers alternate between two treble notes, usually on two different strings, most often the second and first.
[18] A distinctive style to emerge from Britain in the early 1960s, which combined elements of American folk, blues, jazz and ragtime with British traditional music, was what became known as 'folk baroque'.
[19] However, performers like Davy Graham and Martin Carthy attempted to apply these styles to the playing of traditional English modal music.
[20] The style these artists developed was particularly notable for the adoption of D–A–D–G–A–D (from lowest to highest), which gave a form of suspended-fourth D chord, neither major nor minor, which could be employed as the basis for modal based folk songs.
[24] Perhaps the most prominent exponent of recent years has been Martin Simpson, whose complex mix of traditional English and American material, together with innovative arrangements and techniques like the use of guitar slides, represents a deliberate attempt to create a unique and personal style.
[21] By the 1970s Americans such as Duck Baker and Eric Schoenberg were arranging solo guitar versions of Celtic dance tunes, slow airs, bagpipe music, and harp pieces by Turlough O'Carolan and earlier harper-composers.
[27] In 1976, William Ackerman started Windham Hill Records, which carried on the Takoma tradition of original compositions on solo steel string guitar.
However, instead of the folk and blues oriented music of Takoma, including Fahey's American primitive guitar, the early Windham Hill artists (and others influenced by them) abandoned the steady alternating or monotonic bass in favor of sweet flowing arpeggios and flamenco-inspired percussive techniques.
Principally featuring, string slapping, guitar body percussion, alternate tunings and extended techniques such as; tapping and harmonics.
Their progressive contribution played a significant role in influencing a new wave of percussive players including Andy Mckee, Preston Reed, Jon Gomm, Mike Dawes, Chris Woods, Don Ross, Declan Zapala, Erik Mongrain, and Marcin Patrzałek.
The six string guitar was brought to Africa by traders and missionaries (although there are indigenous guitar-like instruments such as the ngoni and the gimbri or sintir of Gnawa music).
His influences included traditional music of Zambia and the Eastern Congo, Cuban groups like the Trio Matamoros, and cowboy movies.
A master of the Fingerpicking style of guitar playing, he has won the SAMA (South African Music Awards) for best instrumental album twice.
Basic slack-key style, like mainland folk-based fingerstyle, establishes an alternating bass pattern with the thumb and plays the melody line with the fingers on the higher strings.
The repertory is rooted in traditional, post-Contact Hawaiian song and dance, but since 1946 (when the first commercial slack key recordings were made) the style has expanded, and some contemporary compositions have a distinctly new-age sound.
Slack key's older generation included Gabby Pahinui, Leonard Kwan, Sonny Chillingworth and Raymond Kāne.
Prominent contemporary players include Keola Beamer, Moses Kahumoku, Ledward Kaapana, Dennis Kamakahi, John Keawe, Ozzie Kotani and Peter Moon and Cyril Pahinui.
True fingerstyle jazz guitar dates back to early swing era acoustic players like Eddie Lang (1902–1933) Lonnie Johnson (1899–1970) and Carl Kress (1907–1965), Dick McDonough (1904–1938) and the Argentinian Oscar Alemán (1909–1980).
Wes Montgomery (1925–1968) was known for using the fleshy part of his thumb to provide the bass line while strumming chordal or melodic motives with his fingers.
This style is distinguished by having a steadier and "busier" (several beats to the bar) bass line than the chord melody approach of Montgomery and Pass making it suited to up-tempo material.
Fingerstyle has always been predominant in Latin American guitar playing, which Laurindo Almeida (1917–1995) and Charlie Byrd (1925–1999) brought to a wider audience in the 1950s.
Slide guitarists often employ fingerstyle, which applies equally to the electric guitar, for instance Duane Allman and Ry Cooder.
Exponents of fingerstyle rock guitar include: Mark Knopfler, Jeff Beck (formerly a pick player), Stephen Malkmus, Bruce Cockburn (exclusively), Robby Krieger, Lindsey Buckingham, Mike Oldfield, Patrick Simmons, Elliott Smith, Wilko Johnson, J.J. Cale, Robbie Robertson, Hillel Slovak, St. Vincent, Yvette Young, Kurt Vile, David Longstreth, Richie Kotzen (formerly a pick player), Greg Koch, Guy King, Courtney Barnett, Jared James Nichols.
