As you no doubt know, many great players wear a thumbpick, and many great players don’t. I used a thumb pick for some years early on, and now use one only occasionally. Some reasons to use one: 1) the angle of attack with your right thumb (assuming you are right handed!) may be very low – nearly parallel to the strings – especially if you are trying to mute the bass strings with the base of the thumb/palm, like Chet Atkins. If you use this low hand position, a thumb pick protruding at a right angle from the thumb provides […]

As you know, there are several ways to hold the guitar. The classical position is more stable, since you contact the guitar with both legs, your chest, and both arms. It provides a good angle of attack for the picking hand, allowing for close to a 90- degree angle of attack with the fingers without bending your wrist to the side. It also provides a good angle for the fretting hand, and, for near-sighted guitarists, the neck is close to your face! Having said all that, when I sit, I prefer the ‘folkier’ horizontal position, with the guitar on my […]

Here is a little exercise moving up the neck that may open up some new sounds for you: In standard tuning, finger a C chord. Now, move it two frets up the neck. Play the five treble strings one at a time. This is a beautiful D chord (with an added 4th and 9th) that many folks have used to great effect, in particular Paul Simon in “Kathy’s Song.” He fretted the sixth string instead of the fifth on this chord, producing a second-inversion D chord (A in the bass), which sounds great. Now, move the C shape up one […]

On occasion I joke with my guitar maker friends (Bill Collings and Steve McCreary at Collings, James Goodall at Goodall Guitars, and others) about why the dots on the side of steel-string guitar necks are located where they are. “Tradition” is the answer I hear most often. Tradition is great in many instances, but I believe slightly altering the location of these dots would greatly facilitate learning the notes on the guitar neck. On a piano, a key-of-C scale is apparent at a glance – it consists of the white notes. But seeing these same “white” notes (no sharps or […]

Students ask me how to learn the names of the notes all over the guitar neck. The system I have devised uses certain frets (5th, 7th, 10th, 12th) as guideposts, from which I suggest my students extrapolate to find other notes. Here is how to get started using my system for standard tuning:  

I had a recent query from my old friend Flip Breskin of the Puget Sound Guitar Workshop about a student she has with thumbs that bend backward severely. She wondered what I might suggest to help him use his thumbs more successfully when fingerpicking and fretting. I realized that some of my thoughts would be applicable to many guitarists whose thumbs don’t bend backward quite so much. So here is my first installment on this subject of thumbs, specifically the picking-hand thumb. Perhaps it will be thought provoking for you. When it comes to playing guitar, I preach relaxation, using […]