Since my last post, I have made quite a bit of progress through the beginning of my “Beginning Fingerstyle Blues Guitar” book. Though it definitely has taken me some time to get into a steady routine, I feel that with the help of proper scheduling and through dividing my practice time into small chunks, I have been successfully making incremental progress towards my goals. The first lesson in this book focuses on proper hand and finger positioning for basic blues chords. Because these are chords I am already familiar with, I was able to move this quickly. Likewise, the second lesson was a review of beginning to learn how to alternate the bass notes with the thumb – a technique I have a bit of practice with already. Putting these two together, as you’ll see was not so easy. Here is a sample of my first lessons so you can understand what I am talking about. I first work on the A chord, alternating the bass notes with the thumb, and move into picking with the melody notes.

As you can see, I’m a little rusty, but at least this book kindly provides a slow introduction through the basics. Next tasks was to bring the alternating bass note and the fingerpicking of the melody notes together. These elements are the essential foundations of every blues fingerpicking, and so it is important not to rush through this process. I have pieced together the progress I made over the 45 minutes working on this to demonstrate the progression of skills, specifically focusing on the A chord:

 

There you have it! First lesson done! I feel that I’ve made a solid start towards awakening my fingers to the blues. I’m excited to see what progress I’ll have made by the end of the first week of practice!