Tommy Emmanuel - His Guitar Picking Technique

Tommy Emmanuel was born into a talented family who inspired and encouraged his talent for guitar finger picking. Picking up the guitar when he was just four years old, he was already a seasoned guitar player when he heard a Chet Atkins record on the radio. This was a defining moment in his life but the direction his career as guitarist took him in was hardly compatible with Nashville finger picking.

Tommy Emmanuel's career as a guitar player took him into the world of rock and roll where he won talent quests as a guitar player, played drums in a rock band with his brother Phil on guitar and ended up playing with the big names in Australian pop music. He embarked on his present career in 1990 with his album "Dare To Be Different" being heavily promoted at a time where the likes of Eric Clapton and Mark Knopfler seemed to have the guitar solo niche cornered.

Tommy had to work hard to remain visible to the record buying public while developing the possibilities he had heard as a child in the technique of Chet Atkins. The Chet Atkins guitar style featured the use of the thumb playing bass and three fingers playing the tune. This technique enabled him to play a melody in a similar way to a piano player with the bass and the lead line both clearly defined.

Chet Atkins' style of guitar playing had its origins in ragtime music which was originally played on the piano. During the early years of the development of the blues and jazz idioms guitar players began to be interested in duplicating the bass and melody combination of ragtime. The most memorable of these guitar pickers was Merle Travis. Travis was born in 1917 in Kentucky where there were already many guitarists using the thumb and index finger guitar picking technique.

Chet Atkins was a talented guitarist who, until he latched onto the Travis picking style, lacked a definitive guitar playing style. He expanded Travis picking to include the use of the middle and ring fingers to play chords and single notes while the thumb played bass. This was the guitar playing style that amazed the young Tommy Emmanuel and filled his head with ideas for a new, more complex kind of guitar picking.


Tommy Emmanuel stresses the prominence of the melody played with the fingers while making use of his thumb to back up the lead. He has often spoken of his love of the self contained quality of a guitar melody bass played by the one soloist.

Tommy Emmanuel has taken the Travis/Atkins way of finger picking to new heights with his energetic approach to the guitar and his talent for staying loose under the demands made by recording and presenting concerts. He uses a thumbpick as did his predecessors, playing a custom Maton EBG808, utilizing a pickup and a condenser microphone in the body. One aspect of Tommy Emmanuel's guitar playing that he did not inherit from Travis and Atkins was the heavy use of his guitar as a percussion instrument on stage.


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