What does fingerpicking mean?

Because fingerpicking started relatively late in China, if you're just a music lover, you've probably never heard of it.

The English name for fingerpicking is FingerStyle, and I don't have any clear information about its origins, just as it's hard to define who "invented" rock. Anyway, the style slowly became independent and recognizable, and now has a wide audience.

In fact, as the name suggests, fingerpicking emphasizes the role of the fingers in guitar playing.

Don't all guitars use fingers?Hm... Let's talk a little history.

Most people are aware that there are basically two types of guitars: acoustic and electric. In fact, the advent of the electric guitar had a big impact on the guitar's place in modern music. Before the emergence of the electric guitar, the status of the guitarist is not high, that time rock and so on now style is not fully formed, a guitar as very limited. The guitar's range is not as wide as the piano's, and the biggest problem with the guitar is that it is not loud enough. As a backing instrument, the guitar was often a supporting role and could not carry the load. Think of a classical orchestra, where the main sound comes from the string orchestra and the wind band, and a guitar has a limited role to play, and in the days when there were no amplifiers, the guitar could hardly be heard. The main role of the guitar in those days was as a chamber music instrument, a small orchestra of four or five people playing indoors for a very small group of people. You can get a feel for what guitar accompaniment was like back then in the song below, and you won't even realize there's a guitar until you listen confidently.

C Major Lackriverinc.com / Mot Later in the US musicians often appeared as soloists, so did we have to take an orchestra with us every time we went out to play? This is when the easy portability of the guitar was shown, the age of electrical appliances came, guitarists could no longer endure the problem of small guitar sound, so the electric guitar was born. The sound of the acoustic guitar is mainly rely on the speaker's *** sound to complete, while the electric guitar can be amplified due to electricity, so the size of the base note (that is, the sound produced by your own strumming) is not so big, which is why you see electric guitars are thinner, while acoustic guitars are thicker. Later, with the development of science and technology, the electric guitar and encountered a good partner effects, and then later is the music production software and mixing tools, etc., the electric guitar to play out the sound of the increasingly diversified, can replace the status of the piano and violin to take the lead, rock and roll has emerged, this time the status of the acoustic guitar has been greatly weakened.

In addition to this, the plectrum was invented, and this is the face of this kind of thing

A typical plectrum plectrum is up and down, compared to the traditional way of plucking with the fingers, the plectrum can play faster music, and the sound is also bigger, nowadays the guitarist in the use of sweeping accompaniment usually choose the plectrum, this is at the same time, because the plectrum is harder than the fingers, when touching the strings, the plectrum is not as hard, and the sound is not as strong, so it is not as hard as the fingers. This is also because plectrums are harder than fingers and have less kinetic energy when touching the strings, so the swept sound is crisper.

Combined with the simplicity and variety of modern music arrangements, finger-picking is becoming less and less of a technique for guitar accompanists.

Combining these three reasons, the acoustic guitar is at a disadvantage compared to the electric guitar, and some classical guitar techniques, such as finger-plucking, are gradually being forgotten. Most guitarists are electric guitarists, and the acoustic guitar has become the usual practice instrument, while the electric guitar has become the performance instrument.

But around the 1970s, with the emergence of a large number of American folk guitarists, most of whom played solo without the help of jazz drums or bass, they began to use or invent new ways of playing in order to diversify their guitar playing, for example, you can listen to the following very classic song

Diamond & Rust. Rust was written in the '70s, but you can already hear a slight difference in the accompaniment, as Joan Baez deliberately staggered the bass and treble registers in the arrangement, and used a fingerpick (a plectrum-like device worn on the thumb) to enhance the bass volume, making the acoustic guitar accompaniment sound as if there were two guitars (or, to be precise, two bass guitars). guitar sweeps are moved away, and the bass bass controls the feel of the intervals of the piece), when in fact the acoustic guitar playing is accomplished through a single guitar. It's almost a ****ty thing about modern fingerstyle playing that guitar players want to play through one guitar to achieve the effect of audibly seeming to have several guitars or several instruments playing at once.

At the same time, amplifiers for acoustic guitars emerged. In addition, many listeners wanted to hear a more natural sound, not just effects and post-processed reverb, and acoustic guitar playing was revitalized, and techniques for playing acoustic guitars for the modern listener slowly emerged. And fingerpicking was born.

Let's talk about the advantages of the acoustic guitar over the electric guitar with the support of an amplifier and you can easily understand the birth of fingerpicking.

The acoustic guitar has an acoustic amp, which creatively means that the acoustic guitar has a drum more than the electric guitar. So it's perfectly possible for a fingerstyle player, with skill, to play what a guitar player would play with a jazz drum accompaniment, by slapping different parts of the body to produce drums of different pitches. Take a look at the link below, it's the first real fingerpicking video we've put out so far, and you might be surprised to learn that the guitar can be played this way! Then we'll move on.

Drifting-Andy McKeeBut I'd also suggest you listen to the CD, to get a better sense of the saturation and variety of the music created by this style of playing

Drifting-CDOkay. As you can see, at the beginning the fingerpicking master, taps the side plate of the guitar many times, and actually taps his right hand nail on the side plate at the end of the guitar while playing.

And then there's the fact that, unlike the standard left-handed strumming and right-hand plucking, he also turns his left hand over to use strumming on the bass strings of the guitar, and there's a lot of string pointing with his right hand as well. These would have been the way electric guitars are played, and if used on an acoustic guitar, it would have been very small, but with an amplifier, or if the guitar is particularly good (fingerstyle masters use basically customized instruments), it's possible to make a big sound.

Two more examples of this kind of playing with the left hand turned up, please poke the following two links:

Canon in D-Trace BundyCannon-CD-Trace BundyPlaying With Pink Noise-Kaki KingAs mentioned above, one of the main ways of playing fingerpicking is to use both hands. One of the main ways of playing fingerstyle is to use both hands to generate sound, which first of all makes the gaps between notes smaller, as if there were more than one guitar playing; also, the left hand uses strumming to create the bass sound, and the right hand is completely free to do such things as strumming, dabbing, hooking, sweeping, drumming, and other accompaniment, which makes for a full and varied guitar sound, and a colorful and beautiful listening experience.

Of course, fingerstyle playing is not necessarily all about technique. The goal of fingerstyle playing is very clear, and that is to continue to develop new playing techniques and to utilize the pure and natural sound of the acoustic guitar in a wider range of contexts, while exploring the use of classical guitar techniques in the context of the new era.

One of the techniques that fingerstyle guitarists like to apply is natural overtones, which is a technique whereby the strings of the guitar reach a ****ing tone through precise finger control, thus emitting a tone that is unexpected in the range of the guitar itself. For electric guitars, there is a technique called artificial overtones, the point of that technique is to push the strings to make the strings tighter so that you can play higher notes, while this method is not practical on acoustic guitars, because acoustic guitar strings push the strings with much more force, and if you want to reach the point of being able to produce overtones, then I do not know how much force is needed. The acoustic guitar can achieve the effect of overtones by quickly moving the fingers away from the strings at the moment of playing, which is technically more difficult, but the overtones are much better, for example, you can listen to the fingerpicked version of the song "loving you" below, in which the dolphin sounds of the original song are accomplished by the overtones of the acoustic guitar, as well as a lot of those crisp sounds with vibrato and very high sounds, all of which are overtones.

Lovin' You - Kotaro Oshio had by this point realized that fingerpicking techniques, combined with the natural sound of the acoustic guitar, could convey more subtle emotions and sound better.

Let's also take a look at the following fingerpicked track, which utilizes basically slide and strum techniques, but with an acoustic amp and a little bit of acoustic delay to create the feeling of an empty mountain vista.

Miracle Mountain - Kishibe MakiTo this point I believe that we have a general understanding of fingerpicking, today due to time relations will be written here, the back of the time will have time to write another fingerpicking masters of the introduction. In the world of fingerstyle, each master's style is very different, their techniques and arranging methods and so on are not the same, so that fingerstyle actually refers to a group of acoustic guitar technology for modern recreation of the master *** with the formation of the style.

Finally, I'd like to offer you another one of my personal favorite fingerpicking pieces ------ Twilight: Twilight live version - -Kitaro Oshio We'll talk later~