Fingerstyle Revisionist: Origins
Interactive Video Masterclass
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About this course
Voted Guitarist of the Decade by Guitarist magazine and winner of multiple Guitar Player Reader's Polls for Best Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitarist, Adrian Legg is an extraordinary fingerstyle wizard indeed. Impossible to pin a style label on his music, Adrian mesmerizes audiences with his jaw-dropping technique, melodic inventiveness and a creative prowess that electrifies the listening experience.
“Legg is, above all, a guitarist of great power, invention and versatility… Through fast-fingered picking, spontaneously layering parts and occasional ringing harmonics, he sounds like an orchestra.”
We’re so proud to welcome Adrian to the family with his first TrueFire course, The Fingerstyle Revisionist: Origins, in which he presents many of the specific approaches that he undertook to develop his fingerstyle skills and artistry. The curriculum is ideal for players who are already familiar with the guitar (intermediate and beyond) and want to develop a solid foundation of essential fingerstyle skills.
”If you go to a traditional music school, they’ll define what you’re going to do. Outside of a formal education, we’re free to decide what we want to do. And that’s the path I followed. In this Origins edition of The Fingerstyle Revisionist, I share with you many of the principal techniques that I practiced to develop my own skills and creative approaches.”
Adrian organized the Fingerstyle Revisionist into two main sections. In the first section, Adrian presents five sets of technique development workouts: 6 Alternating Thumb Workouts, 3 Melodic Movement Workouts, 6 Fingerstyle Pattern Workouts, 7 Banjo Roll Workouts, and 3 Pedal Steel Workouts.
”The techniques I share with you in the Fingerstyle Revisionist will serve you as a foundation to achieve your own sound and extend yourself as a musician. No unnecessary theoretical baggage… you’re going to listen and then play your way through all of the material in the course.”
In the second section, you’ll apply all of the techniques, patterns and approaches that you learned in the first section across five Performance Studies, which are based parts of Adrian’s tunes: Gas Bill: Verse Part, Folky Little Finger, Coging’s Glory: Sections 1 and 2, St Mary's Intro, and Dying Embers: Steel Bends. Adrian also includes two bonus performances to further inspire you: Auld Lang Syne Etude and Mrs. Jack's Last Stand.
Adrian performs all of the Performance Examples and then breaks them down stepping you through the key concepts and techniques used in the study. All of the key examples and performances are tabbed and notated for your practice, reference and study purposes. You’ll also get Guitar Pro files so that you can play, loop and/or slow down the tab and notation as you work through the lessons.
So grab your guitar and let’s start developing you own fingerstyle prowess with Adrian Legg!
What you'll learn
- Execute banjo-style frailing technique on guitar in DADGAD tuning
- Understand the overall structure and philosophy of the Fingerstyle Revisionist course
- Understand the ear-based, non-theoretical approach to learning fingerstyle
- Learn the progression from foundational patterns to performance applications
- Gain awareness of various fingerstyle techniques to be covered in the course
What's included
55 lessons • 34 charts
Hello, I'm Adrian Legg and welcome to The Fingerstyle Revisionist: Origins.
If you go to a traditional classical music school, they'll define within their established repertoire exactly what you're going to do. Outside of that formal education, we're free to develop and decide which ever way we want to go, and that's the path that I followed.
In this installment of The Fingerstyle Revisionist, I'll share with you several of the principle techniques that I practiced to develop my own skills and creative approaches. These techniques will serve you as a foundation to achieve your own sound and extend yourself as a musician in any direction you want to go. There is no extra theoretical baggage in this course, just listening and then playing through all of the material.
We've organized The Fingerstyle Revisionist: Origins into two main sections, focusing firstly on a series of five workouts, designed to equip you with the patterns and concepts you'll need to get through the rest. In the second section, we'll apply the approaches we've learned to six performance studies based on parts of my tunes.
As always, you'll get notation and tabs for each key example, and I'll break down each performance into manageable parts. Let's get started!
In this first section of the course, we'll introduce some basic techniques and fundamentals that you need to build up. Take these techniques slowly and steadily, making sure you have them down before continuing. You'll see on my fingers I've written P - I - M - A - C, which stands for pulgar, indice, medio, anular, and chico, to help you learn classical guitar terminology as well as keep track of my fingers.
This group of six lessons represents how I learned alternating thumb patterns, practicing two hours a day for two weeks. There is no shortcut to learning this, only being learned by doing these exercises over and over again. If you put the time in, and aren't afraid of looking like a fool at playing guitar again, these techniques will become yours. Let's get to it!
This is quite literally where I started working out how to do fingerstyle some forty-odd years ago. At the time I was in a social club band on the Liverpool working men's club scene, and most of the repertoire was country. There was no information flow whatsoever in those days—which is hard to imagine now, as we have the internet and anything we need to know is a few clicks away. As a result, most of us developed technically way outside the mainstream in America, and we sounded very different from each other and the rest of the guitar world. We tended to learn by copying each other.
I had a quite transient lifestyle then, and didn't even have a record player, but could grab bits from band rehearsals and a colleague's record player. Someone in one of the other bands could do a passable alternating thumb-style back-up and filler, and it seemed to me that if he could do it, so could I.
This is what I did for two hours on the first day. If you're brand new to it, you'll find it the same kind of hopelessly ham-fisted slog as when you first put left handed fingers on the fretboard. In the same way you got your left hand fingers to obey orders, you'll be able to organise those on your right hand. It takes patience; do not be downhearted. If Jimmy Moran could do it in Linacre Gasworks Social Club (I kid you not) and if I can do it, so can you. Do it really slowly, build your muscle memory carefully—this and what follows will serve you well.
By the second day of the self-lead programme, I was still fumbling badly, but there were signs of possible life! So, I added in a sixth on the second string, with the right hand staying the same.
By day three, I was becoming more confident, so I added another chord to the programme. Bold stuff indeed, as it reversed the pattern in the thumb and caused chaos, but not for long.
By day four, I could do the A pattern and the E7 pattern reasonably reliably but very slowly, and added in removing finger 1 on the left hand to give a little movement in the treble. Once again, the right hand stays the same.
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