Hi Jim,
Man your experience sounds lots like mine: been playing long time, but my "fingerstyle" (lol ...if one can call it that
) consists really of playing bare fingers and working out the melody and bass lines together best I can so it still sounds like the song. Break up the song to its most basic bass notes and most basic melody, and find the chords and/or transitional notes to make it flow (if that makes any sense). And practicing even basic fingerstyle (like thumb, 1,2,3,2,1 ...Zepp's "Baby I'm gonna leave you is a good one here) can get you feeling more proficient. BTW, Blackbird is a great tune for us who like to "fingerstyle-light" ...don't discount it, man, great tune and one of my faves!
Practice the above finger pattern, and variations thereof, with any basic chord progression to get motivated/inspired you to try and "fill" a brief melody line in here and there. Playing around this way, I've found there are fewer "rules" to fingerstyle than what one thinks there really are (at least that's what my hack sensibilities say
).
FWIW, I've played around with some easier classical tunes: Pachelbel's Canon, Fur Elise, and Ode to Joy are easy (sounds impressive to the non-player, but to a real guitarist it's childsplay
). These may be good ones to goof around with.
As for playing up the neck, try playing only the high 3 or 4 strings of bar chords, and some add-ons and inversions, and you can really add a new flavor to a basic 1,4,5 progression. Sounds very cool, try it on anything. Funny point: I was showing some kids (you know, "cool" high-schoolers
) this on LaBamba and it blew their mind how "cool" the C,F,G sounds in different spots up the neck. That actually made me feel like a real guitarist for a moment.
Hope that gives you something to think about. And great thread, btw!!
Edward
