Complete Fingerstyle Guitar | Reviews

I just finished this course and I have nothing but good things to say about the course and the instructor, Joe Robinson. It took me five months practicing an hour every day, but the feeling of accomplishment is great. I am so happy I put in the work and now I'm really looking forward to Joe's Intermediate Fingerstyle Guitar course. Here are some more details regarding my impressions of this beginning fingerstyle course. For perspective, I picked up a guitar for the first time about 15 months ago and rarely miss a day of practice. I'll first note that this is a beginning fingerstyle course, but it may go over the foundational material too fast if you are completely new to guitar. For complete beginners I recommend starting with a course that has more detail about holding the guitar, fretting notes, posture, etc. I did the "Eric Andreas free thirty lessons" and was happy with that. Joe goes over the basics in the beginner fingerstyle course, but people completely new to guitar may need more instruction. After the foundational material, the course moves to the material specifically for fingerstyle. This includes the basic "boom chick" thumb patterns, basic finger roll patterns and three different 12 bar blues fingerstyle progressions. By the end of the blues progressions, I felt like I was playing fingerstyle guitar. Then we get to the songs. There are three of them. The first one is Freight Train. I pushed through this song mostly because it is such a classic but haven't played it since. I'm playing the guitar mostly because I like listening to the guitar and I could do without listening to Freight Train, even when Joe plays it. The next song is Streets of London. I really liked learning this song. It was fair amount of work, but to me it is a cool sounding song and I could tell I was learning a lot. The final song is Blackbird. This song was pretty easy since it uses about 90% the same chord shapes as Streets of London. It's interesting to me that both these songs were released in the same area at about the same time. In any case, it feels great to be able to play them both. After the three songs, the course presents a bit of guitar-focused music theory. It's really beginner stuff (basic scale and chord formulas), but a decent starting place that might whet your appetite for more. Joe seems like such a good guy that it is fun to watch him go over it even if you already know the material.