At its most basic, the idea is to fingerpick chord and melody lines over an alternating bassline. And so, with more than the basics of fingerstyle already under his belt at a tender age, Tommy had started out on the road to becoming the absolute guv’nor of fingerstyle guitar we know today.Īt the core of Tommy’s considerable arsenal of techniques is Travis picking (named after pioneer Merle Travis) – a technique he was inspired to develop by Chet Atkins at age seven.
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Young Tommy didn’t know what a bass guitar was and had duly worked out how to play both parts on six-string, assuming this was how it should be done. By age six, he was playing in his touring family band delivering rhythm parts with basslines included.
What were you up to when you were four? Tommy Emmanuel was busying himself learning to play guitar, accompanying his mother who played lap steel. TG TIP: Recreate Clive’s ‘no guitar’ approach, by writing music on a different instrument before bringing the piece to guitar. We can’t think of anyone else who could – or would – do this! The culmination of this method came in 2016’s A Winter Carol – a truly unsettling track, comprising two melodies in different keys and tempos, but arranged for solo guitar. Write on paper first and figure out how to play it on guitar afterwards – that’s the idea. What sounds like a massive pain in the backside for most of us actually frees Clive from his own technical limitations (not that he has many!). Clive often writes straight to manuscript without a guitar in his hands. With such virtuosity on display, it ought to be impossible to distill Clive’s genius into practical, bite-sized advice, but there is a key fact you should know. Traditional Irish pieces, John Dowland compositions and the occasional blues tune all get the Carroll treatment, but the majority of his music is self-penned. Where countless acoustic players adopt a percussive approach, by eschewing tippy-tappy body-beating antics, Clive is able to focus more on complex melodic lines throughout the bass, midrange and treble.
Our pals on Guitar Techniques magazine even call him the ‘acoustic Guthrie Govan’, which gives you some idea of the Essex-born virtuoso’s incredible skills. Slight adjustments will help you skip over idle strings.Ĭlive Carroll is arguably the most accomplished fingerstylist in the world today – not a statement we make lightly. TG TIP: You’ll live or die by the angle and trajectory of your pick. The fact she does it all while singing – and that her songwriting is so effective – is frankly unfair.
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She delivers her melodies with dynamics and great rhythmic feel, and even playing blazing single-note lines she creates a full sound all by herself. Molly’s pick dances over the strings like a gazelle. Where most of us would strike an unwanted open string, Fortunately, there’s no shortage of footage of her doing this – although even when you see how it’s done, replicating it is another matter. Molly’s gift is making subtle rotations of her forearm to change the trajectory of her pick. Yes, she’s phenomenal, but she always retains that campfire feeling that you’re being welcomed to join in. But where high-gain shred can scream look at me in an off-putting way, Molly’s Americana and bluegrass stylings always sound inviting and musical.
If she’d chosen a different direction she could’ve been a Steve Morse or an Yngwie Malmsteen. Dizzying lines that would have anyone else stumbling for pace or catching unwanted strings escape Molly’s fingers easily and with great tone.
She’s mastered clawhammer technique, but it’s her flatpicking that leaves us most breathless. Molly Tuttle’s picking hand is terrifying. Greats like John Renbourn and Clive Carroll have done the same. TG TIP: Kaki has used acrylic overlays on her fingernails for greater picking clarity. While the visual component informs my creativity, I still have a very traditional view of composition.” Yet, speaking to Guitar Player, King says she still sees herself as a traditionalist: “I’m actually not reinventing the wheel in terms of my guitar playing right now. When armed only with her signature Ovation 1581‑KK acoustic and her imagination, she epitomises the contemporary acoustic player, using a cornucopia of alternate tunings, percussive rhythms and a keen ear for dynamics. She is also an entrepreneur/inventor, creating the Passerelle, a metallic, moveable second bridge that can be used to wholly rethink what’s possible from the guitar. King’s groundbreaking theatre production The Neck Is A Bridge To The Body took her technically gifted playing style to the stage, using visual arts to elevate the acoustic’s possibilities. She received a Golden Globe nomination for her soundtrack to Sean Penn’s Into The Wild. To think of Kaki King as just an acoustic guitar player is to sell her art short.
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