Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitar Studio

1. Do not buy a Dreadnought. This type of acoustic guitar tends to produce a boomy bottom end but lacks volume and definition in the top end. The Dreadnought is a great strumming and flat picking guitar.
2. Do buy an Auditorium, OM (orchestra model), triple O (OOO) or double O (OO) style guitar. These guitars produce an even or balanced response across all six strings. This is preferable for finger picking and slide playing. Obviously we would not want the bass part of the alternating or monotonic bass style to overshadow and drown out the melody part on the treble strings. The dreadnought would have a bass response that would need serious attenuation by heavily muting with the heel of the right hand. The guitars used in all the videos on this site are triple O (OOO) style guitars made by Gerard Gilet at Gilet Guitars in Sydney Australia.
3. The top of your new guitar must be made of solid timber, usually spruce. It must have grain lines that are tight and straight and run parallel to the strings.

Brother John Morris presents the monotonic bass style of fingerpicking as used by Mance Lipscomb, Lightning Hopkins and Big Bill Broonzy.

Baby please don’t go by Lightning Hopkins. Beginners level Arrangement by Brother John Morris.

Brother John presents a classic blues in A based on the playing of Robert Johnson.
This arrangement is in the monotonic bass style. It also has some syncopated and walking bass notes.

An introduction to slide guitar by Brother John explaining 2 ways of playing bottleneck slide guitar.
1. Single note style with right hand muting.
2. Used in conjuction with the alternating bass style where the slide plays mainly on the first string.
A simple version of Blind Willie Johnson’s Nobody’s Fault But Mine is used to demonstrate this approach.

The Blues Preachers new CD “Next Stop Beulah Land” featuring Brother John Morris on fingerstyle guitar, slide guitar and vocals with Doug Bluetongue Lyons on harmonica and vocals is available for purchase now.
“The new album (Next Stop Beulah Land) is a beautiful example of acoustic blues with tasteful harmonica, classic slide playing & sweet harmonies
… this is bound to do well”.
Scott Levi ABC Central Coast Radio.
Click the pic to the right under fingerstyle community links to be taken to the download page. Clicking on Buy Now will take you to PayPal’s secure server.

An introduction to the Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitar studio by Brother John Morris. Today we are looking at the alternating bass style as played by Mississippi John Hurt and featured in his song Louis Collins.

A tuition video featuring Pay Day by Mississippi John Hurt and played by Brother John Morris. It is in the alternating bass fingerpicking style. Pay Day is in open D tuning (DADF#AD). The bass in this song alternates constantly between the 6th and the 4th strings. There are no chord changes. This piece is a good example of the power and beauty in the simplicity of a melody supported by a D drone.

If you are interested in Flatpicking and you are a beginner, try these patterns.

Pattern 1 (clip1)