With palm muting, try first playing a three chord sequence (or one to start with) muted entirely (that kind of ‘chunky’ sound like in Cecelia), then lifting then mute on and off with different beats, or different chords, to make a pattern.

With left hand muting, try playing one (or three) chords, and alternating pressing and relaxing your fingers, with a simple rythym so you’re not doing too much at once.

With the metronome, many people reccomend it, presumably for a good reason, but I will say that I’ve never used one, but its presumably helpful.

With the fret markers, its kind of like stabilizing wheels when learning to ride a bike, so that you can learn pedalling etc first before worrying about balance. I don’t use them anymore (I kind of feel what fret I’m on not so much visually but by relative distance and the feel of the strings more), and I don’t think they impeded me learning that, but of course different things work for different people - they do make the initial counting frets easier!

Yusuf Islam is great for fingerstyle!

I will try to write the excersise again, as a new reply not in this thread, because its frustrating reformatting over and over - I keep getting an invalid_body_field error when I try to post, idk if it thinks I’m trying to write code?

Some book recomendations, these aren’t ‘how to play’ (though they do have tips), but more just pieces (in tableture and sheet music) that are well arranged and with a lot for begginers. Obviously if you can find them free its better, and I don’t want to tell you to spend money if you end up not being into fingerstyle, but for your consideration. On that subject, before even thinking of perhaps getting a nylon string, or maybe a steel string better made for fingerstyle, go to a guitar shop and ask to try them first, so you can get a feel of them (ask them to tune them or bring a tuner, they’re always out).

1. Fifty Easy Classical Guitar Pieces, Guitar Tableture Edition, Amsco Publications
2. Fifty Great Pieces for Easy Classical Guitar, Amsco Publications

These two are good for learning, arranged well and in order of complexity. A lot are called ‘study no.2’ or similar (like Etude), because they are exercises for students. You’ll end up realising a lot ‘oh this is just C chord with variations’ as you play, and they’re good for learning scales, chords, and timing in a ‘doing’ or intuitive sense.

3. Fingerpicking Beethoven, Hal Leonard

There are a whole range of these by this publisher, of different composers like Bach or Mozart (good because they’re orchestral or piano pieces transcribed for solo fingerstyle guitar, so it helps with learning), and also of different styles, like Latin or Jazz Standards or Film Score and so on. Unfortunately, they tend to have only around 15 or so pieces. But they’re generally well arranged, and not too difficult - not ‘studies’ but also not some kind of advanced concert level piece. You’ll also be more familiar with the songs, from films and shows and so on.

4. 30 Easy Spanish Guitar Solos, Cherry Lane Music Company (distributed by Hal Leonard)

This is great for starting with Spanish style - its not complicated like flamenco, again well arranged and for beginners.

5. Classic Rock for Classical Guitar, Hal Leonard

This is more your genre to a degree, and its good because (while being probably more complicated arrangements than the above reccomendations), you’ll be a lot more familiar with the songs, their timing and style and so on. And, as I mentioned, its a lot easier to get a satisfactory level of fidelity to the ‘whole band’ sound with fingerstyle, compared to strumming.

6. 100 Most Beautiful Songs Ever for Fingerpicking Guitar, Hal Leonard

These are mostly more ‘pop’ songs, again good because of familiarity. Despite the effusive title, they may not be songs you’d enjoy listening to, and the quality of arrangement does vary more than the previous ones, but they’re generally relatively simple, and also there’s a lot of them.

7. Celtic Guitar Encyclopedia, Fingerstyle Guitar Edition, Mel Bay Publications INC.

This is an excellent resource of arrangements of Irish/Celtic ‘folk’ music, which is good as it will be a difference in style and manner of playing. The arrangements vary a lot more in difficulty, but there are lots of easy ones to start with.

Of course, there are many more, for different genres and styles and regions. But these are all good for starting to learn fingerstyle, and even though many are easy (and you’ll end up disliking some), there are pieces in there that you’ll end up playing indefinately. And some pieces you’ll learn the simplified version of, like Canon in D, and then as you progress you can find published the actual concert level music (often individually rather than as part of a collection), to make it sound even better. I tend to avoid the ones that are specific to a band, because I found that the arrangements aren’t always so good - its more kind of ‘merchandise’. Also, because I can’t read sheet music, I always make sure they have the tableture as well, which I can read. The ones with just chords aren’t worth it imo, but then again if you can ‘play by ear’ you can probably use them to figure stuff out.