About

Master fingerstyle guitar with learnfingerpicking.com

PATRICK O'MALLEY GUITAR TEACHER

ABOUT PATRICK O'MALLEY

My name is Patrick O'Malley and I have been a fingerstyle guitarist and teacher for over 20 years. I started off teaching guitarists in person when I lived in Dublin, Ireland. I realised that my fingerpicking students learned faster, developed more creatively and generally stuck with it more than other students. This was particularly true for beginners.

This inspired me to create a course called From Zero to Guitar Fingerpicking in 30 days. This course is a huge success with over 50k students. The course had a 4.7 rating (out of 5) - the course worked and students were learning effectively. Many of them had tried to learn guitar several times and failed - but no more

Resources

This website share loads of learning resources for free to help aspiring fingerpickers. In particular, the learnfingerpicking.com website will:

share best advice for practising
offer lessons and exercises for beginners
offer lessons and exercises for intermediate guitar players (like travis picking)
explain music theory to guitarists (music theory for dummies if you will)

BUT WHY FINGERPICKING?

IDEAL FOR BEGINNERS

I have taught dozens of students to go from never having picked up a guitar before to being really accomplished players.

Over the years, I have experimented and realised that there is a way to teach students that seems like starting with what many would believe to be a ‘complex’ or ‘advanced’ style – fingerpicking using the thumb and three fingers – is actually the best way for a complete beginner to learn.

Learning to strum chords takes a huge amount of practice to create a nice sound
It's hard to sound good strumming chords after just a few days/weeks
With fingerpicking, you hit each note individually and you can sound great after a few days
Students can play really nice pieces after a few days when fingerpicking
Because of this, students tend to STICK WITH IT - the real key!
I have seen this work, time and again with now 50k+ students

MY APPROACH

I have a few principles which help students learn effectively

ask students to commit 15 minutes per day
deliver a lesson in 5-10 minutes which leaves the same time to practice
structure lessons so that each little bit builds on the previous
build-in ways to help students who get stuck
deliver quick wins so that a student can be creative even with one chord

WHY LEARNFINGERPICKING.COM?

Playing open strings

The cost of choosing the wrong teacher isn’t that you lose out on $50-100, it is that the teaching may not stick for you and you may end up with a life where you never learn guitar, rather a life where picking up the guitar is a huge joy and pleasure for you, whether just on your own or playing with other musicians.

For a complete beginner, there is no more effective and no more enjoyable, musical and confidence building way than to start with a couple of chords and a fingerpicking technique. For intermediate and advanced players, there is no better way to learn rhythms, polyrhythms, voicing, composition and melody than to play in a modern acoustic fingerpicking style.

I promise that if you spend 15 minutes a day doing any of my structured courses, you'll notice a huge improvement.

This is the ideal resource for complete beginners who wish to learn guitar.

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