Gotta be a little careful sometimes. When I first learned how to fingerpick (alternating bass, à la Travis picking), I practiced it so assiduously that after a couple of weeks I started getting cramps in my right thumb. I had to set fingerpicking aside for a while. But I couldn't give the hand a complete rest because I was performing regularly at the time, three nights a week. For a couple of months after that, sometimes my thumb would cramp up in the middle of a song. Not good. Eventually it stopped and I took up fingerpicking again. But slow and easy for awhile.

You might want to take a good look at your general technique: the way you hold the guitar, and your hand positions. Any position that makes you bend your wrist a lot could lead to problems. In the early part of Scott Tennant's manual Pumping Nylon, he talks about "releasing," or relaxing the hands and keeping them as relaxed as possible while you're playing. In addition to minimizing the chances of RSI, this is the key to speed. The manual is written primarily for classic guitarists, but just about everything in it applies to any style of guitar. It's a collection of calisthenics. Good stuff for classic, folk, jazz, whatever. And anyone who can actually play all the way through this manual has got to be one helluva guitarist indeed! If you don't read music, that's no problem. The manual comes it two flavors: just music or both music and tablature. Two hour video also available. Good to get both manual and video.

Here is a web site that I think every musician, beginning or advanced, should take a good look at. BLICKY.

Don Firth