i guess im average when it comes to muting. both left and right hand. when it comes to playing funk, im no good, but i think that has to do more with my right hand and my pick technique than anything else. i'll work on this srv bit tomorrow and see if i can progress some more.

Thanks for the advice. It also turns out the tab i was using for blackbird was totally wrong! That's a week of practicing down the pan then. Damn ultimate guitar ...

Also can you recommend some acoutic fingerpicking songs along the same line/difficulty as balckbird for me to try?

sammo - a week of practicing is never wasted if you learned something hehe even if it's just different subconscious methods on switching chord shapes hehehe as for other fingerpicking songs 'dust in the wind' by kansas is a good one to learn with. the guitar part was originally written as lessons for the guitarist's students. it can be a little intimidating at first but it's not that rough once you learn the picking pattern. 'strong enough' by sheryl crow is also quite simple to play (if you can handle her vocie). i'll also take a look for a proper tab for blackbird (might need an alternate tuning though)

chiva - the only way to overcome weak right hand technique is practice hehe. i've seen far too many guitarists fall into that trap especially if they started learning by playing along to nirvana instead of led zep. it's not that nirvana is bad by any means just that it spawned a generation of guitar players that shunned learning any proper technique in the name of 'integrity'.

BTW panbient would you say that personal tuition is worth it? I'm probably going to give it a try soon cos I started playing guitar about 2 years ago now and i can still only handle the most basic things

it all depends on how much time and effort you want to put into it. for myself i just bought lots of magazines and pored through every lesson i could find and kept trying to develop new techniques. i saw it as more of a challenge than anything else kind of like a weird numbers game with all the tablature. then again in my late teens i had more than enough time to devote to it, no internet and a semi full time job while living at my mom's place before going back to school made it really easy to play for 3-4 hours a day (especially once i got my marshall hehe)

being that you're still in the middle of uni i doubt you have much free time so a tutor would probably do you good. or just find another guitar player to jam with, you learn a whole different aspect about playing when you do it with other people. i'd also recommend finding someone that charges per lesson instead of having to sign up for some course and try to score a free evaluation lesson first hehe

sammo - i just found a proper fingerstyle tab to blackbird. it's actually a fair amount tougher than it sounds (and in open D tuning).

i remember llama posting this a long time ago but anyone reading this should REALLY get this program if they don't already have it.

http://www.power-tab.net/

it's freeware also so there's no reason not to have it. by FAR the best tab program i've ever seen. you can find the tab files for the songs here.

http://www.powertabs.net/

it's also possible to get the program to play back the tabs at a slower speed than the real song which makes it a lot easier to learn some of the trickier parts in some tracks.

so blackbird is played using an open d tuning? i've always played it like this

that's pretty close to the tab i saw too. the only difference in the open D tuning is that both E strings are dropped down a step to D. it helps for some of the high parts but i don't think you ever really used the bottom string.

in open d, isnt the a-string dropped one step too?

how do you get it to slow down playback?