Okay, this one has always been a serious mental block for me!
I usually play electric with sort of a bastardized classical picking hand. But there are two techniques that are a) rarely used in classical, and b) would be pretty awesome to incorporate into a modern electric fingerstyle technique, if only I could make my hands do them!
First: Downstrokes with the fingers. In classical, pretty much the only time you pluck a string with a finger down toward the floor is when playing rasgeuado — basically, a form of strumming in which the fingers fan down across the strings, like flamenco players do.
But it's theoretically possible to produce good tones with both up and downstrokes. In fact, some bass players do that (Chuck Rainey, for example). But I've never been able to incorporate that technique convincingly into my playing.
Second: Developing the little finger of the picking hand. Ironically, I was pretty good picking with my little finger as a kid, because I learned to Travis-pick gripping a flatpick between my thumb and index finger, and picking the three top strings with the other three fingers. I didn't do the octave jump with my thumb/pick — I just kept it near the lowest string, and moored my middle, ring, and pinky fingers on the top three. It's not a great technique — the bouncy Travis groove owes a lot to the "inefficient" leaping of the thumb. Now I kind of wish I could use the pinky as fluidly as the other fingers. But NOOOOOOO.....
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Fingerstyle Frustrations?
