Easy Travis Picking Techniques on the Guitar | JamPlay Lesson

hi there this is dawn ross for jamplay.com now a lot of people who learn fingerstyle guitar have heard about travis picking they won't necessarily know why it's called that or what it is necessarily well as a bit of a antecedent to that i'll quote the great leo kaki leo kaki put it really well he said if you want to play fingerstyle guitar first learn the patterns and then second unlearn the patterns and it's really good advice learning the patterns the picking patterns really gets you going gets your hands moving especially your right hand it helps you develop a lot of dexterity and the patterns end up being an open door to a whole lot of repertoire as well because so many picking patterns have been used as the basis of so many famous songs think of songs like the boxer by simon garfunkel or think of leader of the band by dan fogelberg or whatever all these songs have a very strong travis picking pattern in them now travis picking gets its name from merle travis who is sort of a country blues picker and the mostly famous in the middle part of the 20th century and what he was famous for was coming up with a sort of a finger picked kind of accompaniment to his songs now he mostly just from what i've heard i'm not i'm not a big expert on merle travis's music what i've heard from other players is that he mostly just used his thumb and his first finger to create his pattern and so he'd be playing this kind of thing just using his thumb and his first finger and it sounded great it was very rhythmic what happened is through the 60s and 70s and later people started taking that pattern and developing it and turning it into something quite a bit bigger and maybe in a lot a lot ways a lot of ways more useful in a lot of different kind of contexts you could use these patterns to play pop music to play folk music to play country music to play blues music it could be very very you know used across a whole lot of different genres and so for that reason it's a really good place to start in terms of getting your hands moving fingerstyle so what we'll do first is we'll look at the role of the thumb in travis picking now the thumb is pretty much always not just playing bass notes but also really keeping time in a big way and in this pattern you'll see that it's it's really really important so for example let's start with the g chord we're in standard tuning all right and with the standard tuning we're just going to play the the regular sort of six string g chord now there's a couple of different ways of fingering the g chord a lot of us learn it this way with the the b string open like this and a lot of it learn it look this way with a d note here on the the b string of the third fret so they have slightly different sounds here's the the one with the open b and here's the one with the d on the b string just a little bit different so what i'll do is i'll use this sort of more third heavy by third i mean this this note is the third of the chord and it's really really apparent um i'm going to use that chord voicing to teach this pattern now with chords like g the lowest note the lowest g note in the voicing is here on the sixth string here at the third fret of the sixth string you have the note g now that g ends up being the first note in the pattern because it's what's called the root so the root the lowest g in the g chord so the the note basically that gives the chord its name that's what we're going to start the pattern with so we use our thumb we go to the sixth string we play that note on the sixth string the g now the pattern we're going to do with our thumb circulates between primarily for the g chord circulates between string six and string four okay so essentially you're going to be counting time with your thumb like this in a four four pattern you'd be going one two three four one two three four and that just keeps going and going like the ever ready bunny all right so what you want after a while is you want your thumb that alternating thumb part to be kind of like autopilot kind of like we're to the point where you don't have to think about it your thumb just does it it just keeps time it becomes like tapping your foot so it's not like a heartbeat because you don't have to think about your heartbeat but when you tap your foot you have to kind of think about it well when you think about it a little bit and then just let it go and let other stuff happen like i can talk and do it at the same time awesome can't do that and chew gum at the same time but anyway then what we can do is that ends up being our four four time one two three four one two three four it's really just a pattern of two beats that gets repeated once so total of four math math and music are not as related as arithmetic and music are anyway so uh we're doing the the on beats with our thumb and then the fingers fill in on the offbeats so in other words what we're going to do our thumb is going to be counting one two three four and our finger is going to play in double time the notes between the notes okay it's going to split these what are called quarter notes up into eighth notes so we're going to fit treble notes in between the bass notes so we'll end up counting like one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four so the one two three four is still there in our thumb but our fingers are gonna fill in the ends one and two and three and four and like this let's just try this with thumb and first finger to start with okay thumb is alternating between six and four one two three four one two three four our first finger let's assign it to our third string the g string so it's a g chord so there's an open g there and what we're going to do is for now we're just going to go one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and we're doing everything with just the thumb and the first finger one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and so already we've set up a little rhythmic pattern with some of the notes that make up a g chord not all of them but some of them okay let's add a wrinkle to that let's make the thumb part a little more interesting instead of just going between strings six and four let's add a variation to the pattern where we go six four and then five four okay so we end up with one two three four one two three four so what we're doing is we're incorporating more of the notes in the in the chord to make it sound fuller right again just with the first finger here so thumb doing alternating six four five four and the thumb playing the offbeat uh sorry rather the finger first finger playing the offbeats in between the notes there let's try it together one two three four [Music] one and two and three and four and [Music] three and four and one and two one more bar one and two and three and four and stop all right great one more wrinkle let's add another string now what we're going to do is we're going to be using our thumb and first finger but also finger number two okay with guitar playing what we tend to do is we number the number of the fingers thumb and then one two three four so thumb's going to continue doing what it was doing the thumb part hasn't changed much [Music] again we're alternating six four five four in quarter notes like that then on the eighth note and the offbeat we're going to add this string like we were and then after we play string four we're gonna play string two with finger number two this is what it sounds like just the first part of the pattern okay one and two and so i've just done half the bar there the other half of the pattern is [Music] so the finger part essentially keeps repeating it's like um we get the on beat and we get string three on beat string two on beat string three on beat string two so like this one and two and three and four and one and two three and four and one and two and three four and one and two [Music] [Applause] two more bars one and two and three and four one and two and three and four and stop great now that works really well for the g chord starting on string six why again well because that root note is on the sixth string so it's the important string to start with so what that means is any chord that you play in this first position for example any chord that you play that has that root on the sixth string you can play that pattern it should work just great so let's try a different chord let's try something like e minor okay because we're going to stay in the key of g g and e minor have a lot of the same notes in them so they sound good one after the other so when we go to the e minor chord now we're playing the sixth string open to get that e all right so there's our root of the e minor chord all right and we'll play the exact same right hand pattern with the e minor chord let's start with the simpler one where we just use one finger like this together one and two and three and four and [Music] so string numbers six three four three five three four three six three four three five three four three time one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and stop now let's try the same exercise but adding the second finger on the second string like this listen once three four [Music] so string numbers are like this six three four two five three four two six three four two five three four two and the time is still just four four times one and two and three and four and one and two and three and four and so let's try that together all right one two three on the e minor chord and and two and three and four and one and two three and four and [Applause] [Music] string six three four two five three four two [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] good now the next the next wrinkle would be to go back and forth between those two chords okay so maybe what we would do is do two bars of g and then two bars of e minor so all together we'll have this little exercise that's four bars long listen once then we'll try it together it would sound like this one two three four one and two and three and one and two and three switch to e minor one and two and three and four and back to g [Music] back to e minor [Music] [Applause] [Music] and stop now as far as the pattern that starts on the sixth string like that another really great thing to do with these chords that are they're chords that have the root on the sixth string and also the voicings use all six strings so it'd be nice to come up with a version of the pattern that used all six strings because hey you know fuller is usually better more notes is usually more interesting than fewer notes right most of the time not always most of the time so let's try adding one more wrinkle to the pattern making it just that little bit more challenging and by doing it this way we start using finger number three now i know that this for a lot of people is a big challenge a lot of people find doing thumb and first two fingers not too bad thumb and all three fingers it's getting into you know having to walk and chew gum territory so that's all right we'll get there so let's start with our very basic pattern on g like this together three and four and one that's just with the first finger add the second finger [Music] right now what we're going to do is we're going to add the third finger what ends up happening to happen is you you have to play the pattern over the course of two bars so what we'll end up doing is thumb first finger thumb second finger thumb first finger thumb third finger and that third finger is going to be playing on the high string on string number one okay so again assign your fingers uh to the string so finger number one on string number three right here finger number two on string number two and finger number three on string number one and this way you won't have to you know second and third guess oh what finger do i use on that string just be really strict with yourself for now and then it makes the pattern that much easier to play so here's here we're going to start just with the first finger then with the uh second two fingers then i'll er i'll introduce the third finger and see if you can fall right in i'll go back and just do that the pattern with the third finger on its own so here we go three four just the first finger [Music] add the second finger on the b string do that another couple of times one and two and three and four and one now see if you can fall in here i'll come back to this [Music] so what i did there was i took the same pattern that we've been working up towards using fingers one and two and every second time that i would be using my second finger i use my third finger instead on the high string all right so breaking it down really slowly it's like this thumb first finger on third string thumb on the fourth string then second finger on the second string thumb again on the bottom string followed by the third string the first finger followed by the thumb again on the fourth string and then this time we play the highest ring with our third finger so listen again [Music] this way we're playing all six strings in the chord [Music] let's try it together one two three four and one and two and three and four [Music] string numbers it's like this six three four two five three four one [Music] [Applause] [Music] the time is still just a four or four bar one and two and three and four and [Music] and stop so that longer pattern fits all in a 4 4 bar essentially what you're doing is you're taking a two beat pattern that we first learned and making it twice as long by adding that high string and then it makes for a really interesting sounding bar now the last wrinkle in that uh little section where we were doing um a travis pattern starting on with root on the sixth string let's go back and forth between two chords like we did earlier okay the same two chords g and e minor but this time with the fuller sounding pattern where we use all six strings like i said earlier the g and the e minor our voicings that use all six strings so this pattern will sound great because it's a six string pattern in the end all right and we're using thumb and all three of our picking fingers so let's let's try it going from e a g g to e minor listen once what i'll do is i'll do two bars of g and then two bars of e minor back and forth so it'll sound like this [Music] [Applause] [Music] we switch now yeah switched a little early that time back to g [Music] as you can see when i'm doing it slowly like this i'm uh sort of trying to discipline myself to try to play this last note on the g chord before i switch to the e minor makes it a bit challenging if you end up with a that's okay it'll sound great because you're going to the e minor chord anyway so don't sweat it too much let's try it together one and two and three and four and [Music] [Applause] back to g to e minor [Music] two more times [Music] my mistake there that's better [Music] last time [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] great now that pattern that six string four four pattern is something that you can use in a whole lot of different contexts and eventually you'll want to speed it up maybe depending on the piece of music [Applause] it sounds a bit more like a sort of a folk song there or you could even make it almost like a bluegrass kind of thing if you really speed it up okay so that's where we're headed towards with this with this pattern as we develop speed with it so there's your six string picking pattern and we'll be using it a lot here on jam play

Channel: JamPlay

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Keywords: Don Ross (Musical Artist), Fingerstyle Guitar (Musical Genre), don, ross, fingerstyle, finger, picking, pattern, travis, pick, JamPlay, Lesson, free, acoustic, lessons, Acoustic (Musical Album), altered, open, tuning, tunings

Id: UUFiV3RJHPA

Length: 21min 55sec (1315 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2013