Not sure if anyone here is into Matteo Mancuso/Paco/Billy Sheehan, etc but as a side quest I have been messing around with some “fingers” type lead/melody playing semi seriously of late and I am curious if anybody else is messing about with it, and where they’re at with it?
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Is that stuff stolen from bass players? Where does it come from?
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That 10 Levels of Fingerstyle was neat, kind of a Tim Henson Polyphia kind of thing going on, eh? Neato!
So, tapping, or “touchstyle” type stuff, a la Stanley Jordan, and not fingerstyle, a la classical, folk, et al?
This is making me remember I should probably start a thread here on the latter, but I just want to make 100% sure this isn’t the right thread after all. 
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I did not know that, I am so out of touch with who is doing what these days…
Well, the tapping stuff is great, I myself spent quite a bit of time on a Chapman Stick… but I am definitely talking about fingerstyle; specifically used to play lead lines a la Matteo Mancuso or Paco Delucia. Billy Sheehan, Steve Bailey and Victor Wooten do some crazy stuff too!
Finger style is the default for 99% of flamenco players… and it looks like you can’t flamenco without being a virtuoso:
Also, I have been connecting with my Latin roots via Buenavista Social Club which involves a lot of fingerstyle guitar. It is interesting that many of those rhythms (e.g. clave) come naturally to me but if you study them with a little more attention, you realize they are actually kinda weird and are full of little nuances. It’s fun.
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The Flamenco guys are all really, really awesome! I tried to get a good two-finger picado going, but couldn’t really get it much faster than 16ths at about 120. That’s I and M. I had moments of 130, but really the “wall” tempo-wise was 16ths at 120. I tried both a bass player type position as well as a flatter hand position. If we were to use the CTC “starting with speed” concept; no worky.
However, after a bit of a break I decided to run with something that IS fast right off the bat. PAMI. I suck, and I can do about 180-200 on a single string. It sounds pretty umm - not like a pick (I have no nails lol)
But I ended up with pretty consistent, quick gains; 2nps 5’s at 152, ascending after a week, descending the next week, ascending 4’s at 152 after a week, descending 4’s the next day…
I am no flamenco player, I like rock music. Certainly no Paco DeLucia or Matteo Mancuso, but I can do some stuff and it was pretty quick. None of this “decade with a metronome” BS…
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Congrats on your progress! Fingerpicking certainly comes with its own challenges and there are some motions that are naturally faster than others (eg. the AMI pattern you mention).
About fast fingerpicking motions, I have a thesis about a “reduced” version of the AMI pattern but just two fingers, which results in (hear me out) RDT with your fingers. I think Steve Harris relies on a similar motion for his gallop bass lines, and I am trying to validate whether it is close to Stanley Clarke’s technique as well.
Similarly to your current experience, I suck at it as well 
, but you can feel that it’s mostly a matter of synchronicity rather than speed per se.
I am planning to share my theory with the forum one of these days.
There’s also the whole Chicken Pickin’ world in Country of guitarists being influenced by steel guitarists and vice versa. Levi Clay’s books on country guitar have great overviews of a lot of this. On pedal steel E9 tuning there’s a pocket of strings that are a pentatonic scale so you can get pretty fast with that on one fret position and finger picking.
