ABOUT THE FLATPICKER'S GUIDE

Over the years, it has been my good fortune to meet hundreds, maybe thousands, of guitar players of the flatpicking persuasion, and even more, to try to help many of you teach yourselves how to play. We are the lucky ones, my friends: we are the people who get to play one of the world’s most ancient and most beautiful instruments, the steel-string guitar. We are the village pickers and singers, who get to sit around with an instrument of great beauty and antiquity in our laps and make music. There are two essential responses to this gift: one is to be grateful, the other is to be worthy.

Thus, our new feature: If we’re going to be worthy of the gift of the guitar, we need to play it as well and beautifully as we can. That’s a joy, and but it can also be a challenge, a series of problems.

That’s where I come in: In The Flatpicker’s Guide I’m inviting you to submit questions, problems, and challenges that have come up in your playing. My information comes from many sources: research on how people learn, 30 years experience figuring out how university students learn things, and most of all, my conversations with so many of you in every state and over 30 countries. Oh, and I learned a lot from my own mistakes and a few cul-de-sacs as a guitar player.

So I have ideas, good ideas about how to:

• Get off the plateau
• Solve right hand problems
• Create your own arrangements (not someday; now)
• Create breaks to songs (not someday; now)
• Make practice actually work, every day
• Stop struggling, start playing
• Find your own unique style and destiny on the guitar
• Improve memorization
• Escape the frustration of TABS; find the fun of TABS
• Play without driving her (him) out into the night with hands over ears.
• I could go on: what’s your problem area? Let’s try to solve it.

What I Get Out of This

This will be fun, and it will benefit me, too. I need to keep my finger on the pulse of guitar players for my workshops and columns. Furthermore, somewhere in Dante it says that hell will be less hot for people who help others with their guitar playing (I’ve forgotten where that verse is, but I’m sure it’s in there somewhere).

How to Pose a Question

Go to the form here to write a question or pose a problem. Let’s keep it on Guitar music, but I have a few opinions about how to play and not mess up your personal life as well. I will not only answer your questions here on the website, but I will pick the best question every month and award its author a monthly prize. Questions will be judged on value to other guitarists, depth of despair, poignancy of dilemma, and my favorite, outrageousness and humor in the phrasing of the question. Decision of judge (me) is final.

Disclaimer

My answers are not "truths," they’re ideas, but they’re based on a lot of experience, and they have been tested by generations of workshop attendees who have tried them successfully. Some of my ideas may be controversial, some may surprise you, but all are aimed at a fresh look and a restoring the fun and progress to your playing. I won’t try to make you into a player, I’ll provide the information, and you can use it, if it helps, to teach yourself, and become the player you’re destined to be.