Fingerstyle Master Players and a Style Map

Fingerstyle splits roughly into two branches. The traditional / classical lineage: classical guitar (arpeggios, tremolo), country Travis picking (alternating thumb bass), and fingerstyle blues — clean in sound, strongly melodic. The modern percussive lineage: layering percussive hits, tapping, harmonics, and altered tunings onto fingerstyle so a single acoustic guitar plays like “a one-person band,” with American guitarist Michael Hedges as the spiritual source.

Kotaro Oshio (Japan): the icon of Asian percussive fingerstyle, with percussive hits, fingernail strum-hits, and harmonics as his signature. To start, get to know “Twilight” (slow, lyrical, often taken as a first Oshio piece) and “Wind Song” (the fingering isn't hard, the mood is).

Sungha Jung (Korea): YouTube's spokesman for “turning pop songs into fingerstyle,” with highly faithful arrangements, represented by “Kiss the Rain” and “River Flows in You” (simple melodies, good for feeling pop songs turned fingerstyle).

Andy McKee (USA): “Drifting” uses tapping + percussive hits + harmonics + DADGAD, essential listening for modern fingerstyle; “Rylynn” is more lyrical and easier to feel. Tommy Emmanuel (Australia): the “one-man band” who took country Travis picking to its peak. Masaaki Kishibe (Japan): in the modern fingerstyle lineage too, but leaning lyrical with little percussion — the “melodist” of this line, the best fit for getting a feel for Japanese melody-oriented fingerstyle, represented by “Flower” and “Mountain of Miracles.”

Classical: “Romance de Amor” (a beginner milestone, public domain), Tárrega's “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” (the peak of tremolo, public domain). Country: Merle Travis, Chet Atkins (the Travis picking lineage, the source of Tommy's heritage). Blues: Mississippi John Hurt (gentle alternating thumb bass; in fact his “alternating bass” recordings predate even Merle Travis).

At home there's the long-running “Fingerstyle China” competition promoting the form; among the players, Chen Liang's “Untitled” is almost an unavoidable piece for Chinese learners (a composite of percussive hits, tapping, and tapped harmonics), and there are also Yang Haokun, Sun Peibo, and others. Chinese fingerstyle as a whole is most deeply influenced by the two Japanese lines of Oshio and Kishibe.