rcblack278
Verified buyer
06/01/25
Great lessons with supporting tabs, will be working on this for a long time!





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About this course
What you'll learn




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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15 results
rcblack278
Verified buyer
06/01/25
Great lessons with supporting tabs, will be working on this for a long time!
nweekesjunk@gmail.com
05/18/22
Guitarist of the Decade
There is a reason Guitar Player magazine readers voted Adrian Legg "Best Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitarist" for 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996. Adrian is a legend in the guitar world. I have played guitar for three decades. I began my guitar journey largely because of Adrian. I’ve acquired nearly four dozen tutorials by various instructors but Adrian's is very thorough, precise, and informative. Certainly one of the best tutorials. Aside from Adrian’s incredible playing, he is a phenomenal teacher. It is rare for someone to master both fields. Adrian does this extremely well. You won't regret any of Adrian's lessons.
psalm119
Verified buyer
12/16/21
Excellent. Content
Great tutorial video , great content, and great teacher. The learning system is awesome
Inigo1970
Verified buyer
02/26/21
Well done
Jim M.
06/13/20
Adrian Legg's Fingerstyle Revisionist: Origins
Mr. Legg provides a solid foundation of fingerstyle techniques, while offering advice like a kindly uncle. His unique perspective will inform and enhance your ability on the instrument, provided you follow his advice and put in the practice. This course is also good to play as background entertainment while doing chores around the house. I wholeheartedly recommend it.
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