CERTIFIED GREATNESS

Fingerstyle master Tommy Emmanuel combines unique musical instincts and breathtaking technique to become an acoustic tour de force.

- JEFF JACOBSON

IN HIS BOOK, Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell asserts that at least 10,000 hours of practice are required to excel at any given skill. If that's indeed the case, Australian guitar maestro Tommy Emmanuel certainly has a lot more than that under his belt. One of only five guitarists to be bestowed the title "Certified Guitar Player" by the legendary Chet Atkins -a "C.G.P." inlay marks the 12th fret of his signature TE series Maton guitars - Emmanuel is a master of precision, control, touch and tone, with a signature style honed by decades of writing and interpreting a vast array of songs, while relentlessly refining his technique.

It would be a daunting task to try to cover the totality of Emmanuel's style in one lesson, as he is both a master fingerpicker and flatpicker. So, here, we'll be exploring just some of the guitarist's favorite fingerstyle approaches and techniques. Lucky for us, one of New York City's finest fingerstylists, Gilber Gilmore (Instagram: @gilber_ gilmore, YouTube: @1972f1972,), has graciously joined us once again to create videos to accompany all of this lesson's examples, which you'll find at guitarplayer.​com. (Gilmore's videos are also featured in my two-part lesson "Adventures in Fingerstyle Rock Guitar" in the April and May 2024 issues.)

As you'll see in these musical examples, fingerstyle guitar music is often notated with opposite stemming, also known as divisi notation, which allows two independent melodic or harmonic "voices" to be clearly shown and visualized for the reader. Upstemmed notes are generally picked with the fingers, and down-stemmed notes are most often picked with the thumb. In addition, much the same way that fret-hand fingers are indicated with numbers, pick-hand fingers are traditionally assigned a letter, based on the Spanish words for the various digits: p (thumb), i (index), m (middle) and a (ring).