How do you even begin to learn to fingerpick and sing at the same time?

[Rambozo96]

This is something I been struggling with for a few years. I can fingerpick half decent and sing kinda okish/mediocre and can sing and play chords at the same time but if it requires any sort of fingerpicking either I get so concentrated on playing that I miss words or flat out sing gibberish or I focus on the words but my playing sounds like I started 3 weeks ago. Hardly a skill level you’d expect from someone that’s been at it for 13 years. Any pointers will be appreciated.

 

[jedzep]

I think with either picking style I have to have the guitar part down so pat that it's almost boring to play, then introduce the vocals. I sometimes hum the words to keep focused on the tune while I drill it into my muscle memory.

 

[Rayk]

Get some chewing gum start chewing and walking and then rub your belly or something.lol but what jebzep said . Though I don’t play that way . I record then sing . No live shows for me ! Lol

also it easier to do the more simple that songs are .

 

[MLBob]

I think it’s probably linked to some of the things Malcolm Gladwell cited in his “Outliers” writings. May not be linked to a specific or exact hour requirement, but certainly related to time spent repeating the processes involved over an extended period of time - and/or on a regular basis.
Hopefully, much of that time spent is enjoyable, but time spent repeating a process with a deliberate goal of improving has to be a huge factor….and I don’t doubt that there are those individuals who’s combinations of skill sets & gifts make their time spent count for more than that of others. They get there faster.
A lot of the fine- artists I know refer to the development of technical skill as “time on brush.”
With regard to fingerpicking songs and singing, I find it can be frustrating when one finally feels he has a song down - only to have it disappear into the many songs one likes, and with that disuse, have to be worked on to regain/ maintain the level of muscle memory you once thought you’d developed.

 

[walrus]

+1 on muscle memory. You have to play the song until you don't have to think about it, and then the words will be easier to sing. And of course, it helps to know the lyrics by heart. It has to be almost "unconscious" behavior. For me, only repetition will achieve that.

walrus

 

[dreadnut]

Do you know the song by heart or are you singing off a sheet? My singing/playing does much better when I have the lyrics memorized.

Also, I thump out the rhythm on a low string with my thumb, keeps my voice in time,

 

[adorshki]

I think with either picking style I have to have the guitar part down so pat that it's almost boring to play, then introduce the vocals. I sometimes hum the words to keep focused on the tune while I drill it into my muscle memory.

Yeah that's the only way I know of. Maybe that's what separates "the naturals" from the rest of us: they can do it with minimal practice.

 

[Walter Broes]

Once you don't have to think about the picking patterns or what your fingers are doing, it has to become some kind of automatic action like flipping a light switch in a house you've lived in forever - you know where it is, you don't have to look for it or think about it, you're almost not even conciously doing it. So yeah, muscle memory and practice, practice, practice.

 

[jedzep]

Redundancy is the mother of retention.

 

[Nokomite]

I always found it interesting that B.B. King could not play and sing at the same time.

 

[Walter Broes]

I always found it interesting that B.B. King could not play and sing at the same time.

Oh, he could! He just evolved to a situation where he didn't have to! BB King was always too modest about his skills - but if you listen to his earlier records, there's quite a few surprises on there, things he didn't do very often but was actually pretty great at.

 

[PittPastor]

I pick half of the songs I do. I'm more likely to mess up a strum than a picking pattern now (especially if it is a heavy rhythm pattern)

I think the picking pattern needs to be burned into your muscle memory. Are you always using the same pick? Is it always the Travis pick? You might want to start with one pattern, simplified as much as possible. And then burn it in.

Years ago, I was being taught sleight of hand by a professional magician. Some of the moves he could make with cards seemed impossible. I told him that and he said: "To be a magician, the impossible must become hard, the hard must become easy. And the easy must become habit." Which sounds all "Wise wizard and useless" until he winked and said: "But the secret of a magician is that he reverses those..."

In other words: Start with the habit.

The hardest pattern for me to learn was what Chapin did on "Corey's Coming." I remember when I first got the tab for that and it just made no sense to me. I couldn't "Feel" the pattern at all.

So I wrote down the right hand's pattern. I would practice it everywhere - just lightly tapping it out with my fingers... Your know like regular "finger tapping" on the desk or table... Except I was using the pattern. I would sit on conference calls at work... Sometimes even in a meeting. Driving in the car I would tap on the steering wheel. You can tap anywhere.

That pattern became second nature after awhile. Transferring it to the guitar didn't take much time. And when I finally did start playing the song... the right hand just did its thing.

I couldn't tell you how many hours that took. It was probably way more than I thought, and certainly way more that I would have invested if I only did it when on the guitar.

Whatever works for you... You need to make the the impossible easy. Build the habit.

FWIW

 

[Nokomite]

Oh, he could! He just evolved to a situation where he didn't have to! BB King was always too modest about his skills - but if you listen to his earlier records, there's quite a few surprises on there, things he didn't do very often but was actually pretty great at.

From Peter Guralnick’s book on Sam Phillips.

 

[Nokomite]

Also: https://theconversation.com/bb-king-was-great-because-he-played-out-of-tune-41910

“And his musical vocabulary was limited; King once told Bono: “I’m no good with chords, so what we do is, uh, get somebody else to play chords… I’m horrible with chords”. He even claimed that he couldn’t play and sing at the same time.”

I am not an expert, but I saw him perform about a dozen times in the 70s and 80s and he never sang and played at the same time. Sam Phillips and Guralnick would be reliable sources.

 

[dreadnut]

Also: https://theconversation.com/bb-king-was-great-because-he-played-out-of-tune-41910

“And his musical vocabulary was limited; King once told Bono: “I’m no good with chords, so what we do is, uh, get somebody else to play chords… I’m horrible with chords”. He even claimed that he couldn’t play and sing at the same time.”

I am not an expert, but I saw him perform about a dozen times in the 70s and 80s and he never sang and played at the same time. Sam Phillips and Guralnick would be reliable sources.

I find it nearly impossible to sing while playing leads.

 

[richardp69]

I just accept the fact that I'm not much of a player and concentrate on getting the vocals right and playing just well enough to avoid complete embarrassment (and I often times fail at that as well)

 

[Nokomite]

It took me literally months to learn to play and sing Mississippi Blues. At the time I was new to syncopated fingerpicking and the alternating thumb, so that took plenty of time, and then to sing it and play it at the same time over the syncopation also seemed impossible, but eventually I could do it. On YouTube, Stefan Grossman has a story he tells when he’s playing it that he even had difficulty talking while fingerpicking it in the background, and that also took time to do.

Moral of the story is, keep at it and don’t give up. Think of this as the ultimate lifelong learning experience and joy. It feels great when you can finally play something you never thought you ever could.

 

[Walter Broes]

Sam Phillips and Guralnick would be reliable sources.

Sam Philips was a visionairy and an amazing producer and important figure in the history of music, and Guralnick is one of my favorite music writers, but neither is a musician or a guitar player.

 

[Nokomite]

Sam Philips was a visionairy and an amazing producer and important figure in the history of music, and Guralnick is one of my favorite music writers, but neither is a musician or a guitar player.

But that wasn’t the point. The point was what BB King told Phillips (and later Bono, and others) that he couldn’t play and sing at the same time. I’d say that’s pretty good confirmation. BB was very close to Phillips since the earliest days in Memphis. If you haven’t read the Phillips bio by Guralnick, it’s great.

If you have a reliable source that this isn’t true, it would be good to post it. I’d be interested, since the other is pretty much the common lore about him, and what I witnessed in about a dozen live performances in a small venue in Houston, TX called Rockefeller’s.

 

[Walter Broes]

Yes, the Philips bio is great indeed, have it! Point I was trying to make about neither of those esteemed gentlemen being guitar players is that their observations about guitar players might not always be exact.

King didn't play much rhythm if at all, especially once he could afford larger bands - the couple of times I've seen him he had a rhythm guitar player in the band, so why would he? I especially love his pre "live at the Regal" work, and there are quite a few surprising little moments in there, where he plays some pretty sophisticated Charlie Christian inspired arpeggio lines, comps some very nice chords behind someone else's solo, etc...
While this seems to contradict what Philips said about him, it doesn't necessarily - if you listen to King's recorded output chronologically, he gets better and more sophisticated at a pretty fast pace throughout the 1950's. The recordings Philips made do show he was a little more primitive and crude at that time, but he got a lot better very quickly. His style changed too, early on he was one of the many T-Bone Walker imitators of the period, and his leads were largely minor pentatonic, almost no bends, no vibrato. But that changed into a much more sophisticated and idiosyncratic thing within just a couple of years.

I bet he mostly didn't want to play rhythm behind his vocals - in the Sam Philips days, he was probably too green and scared he might screw up, and not much later, there was absolutely no need for him to play rhythm in the larger bands he had. But with his chord vocabulary, sense of timing and level of sophistication by the late 50's, I'm pretty sure he could - he plays lines and chords between/interwoven with his vocals that are a lot harder to play than basic rhythm.