1. Keep your nails at a consistent length.[br]A constant annoyance for guitar teachers (myself included) is when fingerstyle students come to lessons each week and their fingernails are all different lengths and at different lengths to the previous week.
2. Highlight those bass notes
The bass notes are very important in fingerstyle guitar. Often the bass notes are ringing throughout while the treble strings (strings 1,2,3) are being picked multiple times.
3. Prioritise the melody notes[br]There are two main schools of fingerstyle guitar. One is the traditional singer-songwriter school, which is where a singer will play guitar and fingerpick notes from within the chord. Your traditional guitarists such as James Taylor and Paul Simon do this a lot.
4. Do not lose the groove[br]It`s really easy when fingerpicking to get lost in all the fancy melody notes and interesting harmony lines that can be created. So much so that the guitarist can forget all about the all-important groove.
5. Work on the picking hand’s muscle memory[br]Lots of guitar teachers and guitarists talk about muscle memory, but they only talk about it in regards to their fretting hand. It is very rare that someone will talk about muscle memory in relation to the picking hand.
