Celtic Fingerstyle Guitar

Photo by itzafineday
Fingerstyle guitar lends itself beautifully to playing Celtic music, even if you are not a guitar virtuoso. Before we get too far into “Celtic guitar” let us make it clear that until the nineteen fifties the guitar was not a Celtic musical instrument. What we know as Celtic music is another we have found of expressing our twenty-first century feelings using the scales and techniques of the past.

The traditional music of Scotland, Ireland, Brittany and Wales is the broad source for modern Celtic music players with some taking an interest in music from Galicia and Asturias in Spain.

The rise of Celtic fingerstyle guitar music came with the popularity of English folk songs and the need felt by some musicians to present them to a modern audience. During the nineteen sixties future giants of the fingerstyle acoustic guitar like Martin Carthy and Davy Graham began to influence the folk music scene. These guitar players arranged Celtic tunes originally composed for bagpipes, harp or tin whistle. This interest in Celtic music led to the name of Irish composer Turlough O’Carolan becoming a familiar name to folk music fans.

For anyone looking for CDs of Celtic fingerstyle guitar music, some artists to look for are Pat Kirtley, Steve Baughman, David Surrette, Alan Stivell and El McMeen. Some groups engaged in putting traditional music into a modern setting are English groups Fairport Convention, Pentangle and Steeleye Span, and Irish groups Planxty and Clannad. These groups began in the nineteen sixties to add electric instruments and a modern beat to ancient acoustic music with varying degrees of success.

The challenge for a modern fingerstyle guitar player to arrange Celtic music for the guitar is to somehow evoke the mood of Celtic music. The most obvious way to do this is to tune your sixth string down to D. If you do this and play a D minor chord you will feel already the new mood that the droning sound evokes. You can also go a step further and tune your guitar to the D-A-D-G-A-D tuning. Playing in this tuning emphasizes the droning effect with the strings ringing in sympathy with each other as you play. Using hammer-ons and pull-offs helps to create a similar feel to the trills in pipe and fiddle tunes.

Before you go looking for Celtic style music to play, let us think about what kind of technique you can use to make the most of the possibilities offered by the guitar. It is probably best to use the alternating bass style fingerpicking as a basis for working out arrangements of Celtic music. In this style your thumb keeps the rhythm going by playing alternating bass patterns on the lower strings, and your index and middle fingers play the melody and grace notes on the higher strings. The use of the D tunings often renders conventional pattern picking unnecessary because the ringing and droning strings often fill the “empty spaces” that bass and fill notes eliminate in blues or folk playing.