Hi, John, for my money "contrapuntal" would mean that you are playing more than one distinct melody line at the same time. What you describe seems to go by the name of "alternating bass" or a host of other things.

After some earlier false starts, I have spent somewhat less than the last year working on this style and from my experience I agree with the others that it takes a while as the thumb gradually requires less and less attention from you. I'm about to the point now where I am able to arrange and play simpler pieces for myself in this style and make them sound good to me (i.e. like performable pieces, not exercises), and the experience is recent enough that I can tell you how I got there. Some of these others guys are no doubt much better at this game, but it might be useful to describe a process that is still fresh in my mind.

My main guide was Ken Perlman's _Fingerstyle Guitar_ book, which is nearly entirely devoted to this style, and I recommend it highly. I've been able to make the book work for me without a teacher (I don't actually know anyone who plays in this style), which is pretty high praise. I have also found a few exercises I invented and a book by Steve James called _Roots and Blues Fingerstyle Guitar_ very helpful supplementary exercises. Given that Ken places heavy emphasis on Mississippi John Hurt pieces at the beginning of that book, all the advice from other posters about looking into his music sure sounds right to me.

My main failing (and the reason for those false starts I mentioned earlier) is impatience, so if you suffer from that as well I can offer some warnings. Ken's book essentially starts you with pattern picking over standard chord forms, which I was a bit bored with ("I wanted to learn melodic picking, not this!"). Thus, after working out a piece that way, I wanted to push on immediately. This is a mistake, because the patterns he presents are chosen to build the finger skills you need (the bass and treble notes appear about in the locations and relationships you'll need them later for melodic picking).

The best thing that ever happened to me was that I needed to have some actual songs to perform, so I had to stop working through the book at this point and work on a small repertoire. I arranged some songs of my own choosing as pattern-picked pieces using the patterns he gives (feeling that I might as well use what I'd learned alongside stumming styles I already knew), and in learning them far better than I would have as exercises I really drove them into my fingers. Coming back to the book after a couple of months of solid work, I found moving ahead easy, whereas before I wasn't making much progress simply because I hadn't yet absorbed the previous material completely. I think the key is, as Ken mentions somewhere in one of his books, to stop when you seem to really bog down and go back and work on the previous material, then return at a later date. The best way to do this is to build repertoire. At the pattern-pick level, all you really need is some lyrics and chords to songs you know how to sing, if you can't arrange a harmony for yourself. These are easy to get in print and on the web.

BTW, a *good* teacher would no doubt tell you all this. I don't have one, and I no doubt wasted a lot of time working it out for myself.

After the pattern picking, Ken first touches on inserting the melody into the pattern, then on discarding the pattern entirely. I found that inserting the Freight Train melody into the pattern was pretty easy, so I can't offer much help at this point. But if you don't find it easy, I strongly suspect it would be a mistake not to grit your teeth and nail it down cold. Moving on to the first pure melody plus bass piece (Louis Collins), my experience was (just as another poster said) that at first you learn each measure as a new pattern, which is slow but doable. At about this point I really started to be frustrated; I could feel that the thumb and fingers were ready to be independent, but I couldn't feel them actually operating that way as I played. At this point I highly recommend trying the following additional exercise which I invented out of desperation: begin to play scales over the alternating bass.
So first make sure you know where the scale notes are! Try, say, a basic open C chord, and get a steady bass going. This should be very easy after all the pattern picking you're supposed to have done already. Now drop the bass and play a C scale up and down *while holding the C chord.* You want to restrict it to first position on the first three strings, so for open C this would be (going up):

third string: G, A
second string: B, C, D
first strong: E, F, G

You'll have to move a finger from the chord form to make the fretted notes, but again if you've worked through Ken's book or something similar you'll already be familiar with this from playing patterns with melody notes inserted. Play it up and down until you more or less know without thinking much where the notes are located.

Now the exercise: get the steady bass going again, then when you are ready try to play the scale over it. Go as slow as you like; the first time I think I would play a new scale note on the 1-beat (as a pinch) of every other measure. This left me two measures to think about where the next one was and made it very very easy. After I got this down, I did it every measure, then two per measure (i.e. half notes), then quarter notes. Then I went back and did the same thing, but with the notes in between the beats (i.e. on the "and" of each beat). Again start slow (say on the "and of 1" of each measure), then speed it up (two, then four per measure).

Literally about an hour of this was like a dam breaking as far as feeling the separation of fingers and thumb and being able, which means I should have done it far sooner. If it isn't like that for you, it probably only means you started earlier than I did, as you should. The key, I think, was that I was (a) playing the simplest possible "melody plus bass" and (b) doing it by ear. I realize that "playing scales" is anathema to a Real Folkie, but as the easiest possible step to playing melodies by ear I doubt it can be beat.

At this point I also learned the first song in the Steve James book I mentioned, "Take Me Back." It is essentially at the same level as "Louis Collins," so you're ready for it at the same time (I actually learned it first). Remember what I said about repertoire? Each of Ken's songs introduces some new technique, which makes sense, but you want to nail them down before you continue. Having a second song at this level (one I like well enough to consider playing it for others) was very, very helpful, so find other books to use as repertoire books or get a teacher who can help you do this. I found I made better progress by "making haste slowly" than by trying to tackle Ken's songs one after the other. Louis Collins and Take Me Back worked very well together to get the system working.

I have actually stopped working on Ken's book again at this point, because I now have enough skills to arrange some songs this way and so would you. Remember the bit about driving the skills home? That's what I'm doing right now, finding songs I want to play and working them out in this style. When I feel ready for it, I'll go back to the book and continue. At this this point, with the skills Ken has presented you need songs whose melodies can be played on the first three strings in first position in some open-chord key, but fortunately it isn't that hard to find folk songs that fit this description. I actually don't mind barre chords (which Ken can't assume in the book) and so I can invent my own ways to stretch the melody up the neck a bit, but that wouldn't be necessary.

Hope that's useful. It's great fun to be playing melodies, so I think you'll find it worth it to stick with it however long it takes.

Dustin