Bits and chunks of good advice here. And some not so good. "Get thee to a good teacher" is one of the better bits.

I have to agree with Murray here about not anchoring the pinky. I know a lot of people do it, but it's still not a good idea. Cautionary tale:   Back in the early 1960s I met a young gal—she was eighteen—who played some darn fine guitar and could sing like an angel. She was from the Los Angeles area and had been taking classic guitar lessons since she was fourteen. Her teacher in Los Angeles was associated with the Romero family. In addition to playing some fairly impressive classic pieces, she had a good (and growing) repertoire of folk songs and ballads, and her accompaniments where clean and interesting. As far as folk techniques and styles were concerned, she could watch somebody play and after a few minutes of experimenting, she could do what they were doing.

Okay, flash forward to the 1980s. She wanted to learn some alternating bass fingerpicking, which she hadn't tried before. Instead of just having someone who knew how show her a few patterns to work on and figure out the rest on her own—which is the way I learned to do it—she attended a week-long guitar workshop and had several private sessions with a well-known fingerpicker. He (who, incidentally, couldn't do anything but fingerpick) insisted that she anchor her pinky. She played a lot of stuff that way for quite a while and got use to resting her little finger on the soundboard for everything.

She lost all the classic stuff she used to play, and there are a whole bunch of other things that she used to do on the guitar that she can't do anymore because they require a free right hand. I suggested that she go back to the way she used to play, but she complains now that her right hand feels "insecure" unless she braces her little finger on the soundboard.

This convinced me that anchoring the pinky qualifies as a bad habit.

Don Firth

P. S. Prepare for more howls. . . .