How to crosspick and play “Wildwood Flower” - with Molly Tuttle

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] foreign hey i'm molly tuttle and in this lesson i'm going to talk about cross picking and i started cross picking when a couple years after i started learning guitar and i got really interested in it because i like how with this style of playing you can fill out a whole chord around the melody and it's a way besides strumming the strings to really hear the whole of what's happening in the song so here the chord changes and the melody at the same time and there were a few guitar players i listened to who did a lot of cross-picking i was a big dave rawlings fan i'm still a huge dave rawlings fan david greer incorporates a lot of it this stylin to his playing um of course tony rice clarence white and also george shuffler who played with the stanley brothers he was one who really incorporated a lot of cross-picking into his style of playing and they were all people i listened to for this style so what cross-picking is is basically taking could be three strings or more and playing across the strings alternating between the strings and there's a bunch of different patterns you can use with this style of playing but i'll show you a couple basic patterns so let's say we take the fourth string the third string and the second string and we're gonna start with this pattern on the fourth string and then play the third string and the second string so we're never we're not hitting the same string twice we're alternating between this three [Music] and i'm using a picking pattern that's alternating so i'm going down up down down up down and you see people do this different ways i think the two most common picking patterns for cross picking are going to be the alternating down up down or the other thing you see that i've seen tony rice do is down down up so you could try out both of those and see which sound you like more i think the down down up has a bit of a smoother sound versus you can hear the definition of the notes maybe a little bit more with the alternating so once you have that down taking those three strings and playing each of them then you string them together so i think one of the cool sounds with cross picking is you're taking three strings and sometimes putting it over a song that has four beats per measure and so it sounds like this so that low string which is usually the string that you're playing the melody on creates a syncopation with the three over four pattern so if you're taking alternating pick direction it's going to be down up down and the second time you go back down to the low string we're going to start on an up so it'll be down up down up down up down up down up down you just kind of can go on like that forever if you're doing the down down up you just keep it the same each time so down down up down down up [Music] but remember to not leave pause in between those um patterns of three we want to create like a cyclical line with them so if we're taking this pattern and putting it in a measure of four we're playing eighth note so the cross picking pattern is that we're learning is playing all eighth notes um then eventually we will probably want to square it off into a measure so we're going to take this pattern and turn it into a little segment that we can fit into a four beat measure so we'll do it twice in a row so there we have six eighth notes and now we're just going to tack two eighth notes on so that we have a square um four beat measure so i'm just going fourth string third string second string fourth string third string second string fourth string second string so let's try that a few times yeah and if you're using the other pick pattern you can go so end the same way with the down up down down up down down up down up or try the alternating down up down up down up down up so try those two pick patterns and practice that you can practice it on the different string groups so maybe starting on the third string and we'll just put down a c chord to practice practice this with so we'll start on the third string second string first string [Music] and now try starting on the fourth [Music] string [Music] so once you're comfortable with all those string groups you can start putting cross picking into a song but first i wanted to show you guys a different pattern to use and when i think of cross picking it kind of reminds me of like a banjo role because the banjo if you're playing three finger banjo you have three finger picks on and you're playing these patterns of three over songs that are often in four sometimes in three but often in four four and it creates this syncopation which is something that i really love about bluegrass music so if this first pattern we learn it sounds like more of a forward roll on a banjo now we're going to learn one that sounds like a backwards roll so instead of starting on the fourth string and going to the third string we're gonna start on the fourth and go skip the third go up to the second and then go back down to the fourth string so we have fourth string second string third string so let me show you how to use this first cross picking pattern in a song i'm going to take the song wildwood flower and i'll show it to you without cross picking first and then i'll add in the cross picking around it to show you how the melody changes once we add in this syncopated three note pattern so this song if you're familiar um i learned it from mother maybelle carter and there have been so many different guitar players playing their own versions of this song but the melody goes like this [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so if we take the melody with no crossbaking by itself it sounds like this and then when we add in the cross picking it'll sound like [Music] so you hear how [Music] it comes [Music] it takes those melody notes and puts them ahead of where you think they will fall instead of it becomes [Music] and that's what syncopation is it's a melody that falls either ahead or behind of where you think it's going to be so i'll break down that song now and show you how this pattern that we learned fits around the melody of wildwood flower so we start off our first melody line is [Music] so it starts on the third string and i'm just going to play that pattern we learned down up down up down up down up and put the melody around it and now we go down to the fourth string and played around the next segment of the melody which is a similar melody motif so now we have this two finger two finger c chord put down your third finger and back to the c chord shape so we have and now we go to the g chord so we have all open strings just putting down that second finger for one note and back to the c [Music] and back to the top so that's the whole a part of the song [Music] do [Music] [Music] and now the b part melody sounds like this [Applause] so this part gets a little trickier with our pattern because the first melody note is on the first string so far we've had our melody mostly on the bottom string of the pattern but we're going to slide into this c triad up here so i take my third finger and slide it from the third fret to the fifth fret put my first finger down on the first string here and my second finger is going to be below my third finger on the third string so we have fifth fret fifth fret third fret so it's similar to the pattern we learned but we're starting on the second string and adding a little pause after that [Music] now we go to an f chord so i'm going to put down a little f triad here with my first finger bard and second finger below it back to our original pattern and then we finish off the song [Music] so here it is at tempo [Music] so [Music] [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Guitar World

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Keywords: guitar world magazine, guitar world, guitar, gear, guitar lesson, molly tuttle, crosspicking, wildwood flower

Id: sHT4HibXPeA

Length: 13min 44sec (824 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 05 2020