TRAVIS PICKING - The most useful fingerpicking pattern, 6 easy steps!

[Music] do [Music] [Laughter] [Music] [Music] so [Music] hey it's james here from guitarist.com and today i'm going to teach you how to travis pick on guitar travis picking is a style of finger picking where your thumb alternates between two or three strings while your fingers pluck a simple pattern or even play a melody and as you saw in the demo at the beginning of this tutorial it's used in a ton of tunes you know from country to folk blues pop you know you can play melodies with it you can use it over simple shapes instead of a strumming pattern [Laughter] now i designed this lesson in steps because i want it to work for all kinds of learners so keep that in mind as you go through this lesson if you get stuck just go back a couple steps and really work on it until it's comfortable you know we're just going to be adding one tiny little extra bit each step so if you go sequentially you're pretty much guaranteed to get it also there's a worksheet to accompany this lesson has every exercise and example tabbed out for your convenience it's laid out in a step-by-step fashion just like this lesson so you can work through these exercises and song snippets at your own pace that's available on my patreon page and there's a link down below for that you should also take advantage of my free ebook it's a hundred percent free for all my subscribers there's a link down below for that as well either way we're going to get started with the basics we're going to place our fingers on the strings and when travis picking there's it's kind of a hard and fast rule you know 99.999 percent of the time your thumb is in charge of the three thicker strings so the e a d and it kind of just goes between a couple of them and your fingers they each get one of the thinner strings your pinky doesn't really have any part in travis picking your first finger is on the g string your middle finger is on the b string and your ring finger is on the high e string so the bottom three strings with your thumb and then [Music] g b e with your fingers so that's step one you know just place those three fingers on the strings and now we're going to warm up a little bit i want you to place your thumb on the thickest string our fingers are on the top three strings and we're gonna pluck with our thumb and then with our fingers one two one two and we're just getting used to plucking you know because you might be snapping the strings a bit we just want to be nice and gentle and we just count one two one two one two and you could use this simple pattern on some basic chord shapes and you could use that in a song right away you know instead of a strumming pattern [Music] [Music] you know so we're not travis picking yet but the fundamentals are there you know and you can already use it to play that was what i got by sublime and you may have noticed there that my fingers stayed in the same spot but my thumb was traveling to a different string for each chord and that's because each chord has a root and that's the primary note that your thumb is going to pluck when you switch to that chord shape so we need to build up some muscle memory so our thumb kind of automatically picks the correct string for each shape and i want to do this the same way we would when learning a song so let's just pick three chords you know first we'll do a d and e so we have our a chord our fingers are on the top three strings for all the chord shapes our thumb is on the a string because that's the root of the a chord you know then we can go to d our thumb is on the d string and we could go to e the thickest string for our e chord you know so we're just using our thumb fingers pattern and woke up this morning [Music] and you'll want to learn the roots of the eight basic shapes c a g e d a minor d minor e minor and all of that is written down in the worksheet and there's a page in my free ebook which you can see right here that has all of it written down for you so don't worry if you can't remember all that you know i wouldn't expect you to memorize it that way anyway the best way to remember them is to learn a song that uses a couple shapes like a two or three chord song and really nail those shapes you know use this simple pattern follow the roots and then you move on from there learn a couple more three chord songs and you're actually putting it all to use anyways next we're gonna learn to pluck the thickest string with our thumb on beat one like we just were and then we're going to pluck the d string with our thumb on beat three and our fingers are playing beats two and four we'll do that on an e minor chord so we're gonna go one two and then on beat three we're gonna pluck the d string three four one two three four one two three four so our thumb is alternating between a couple different bass notes and that's the essence of travis picking and i want you to focus on your thumb you know even just doing the thumb part just the thickest string then the d string and for e minor that's the root and we're going to call this other note our alternate you know it's like an alternate bass note so root and then alternate on the d string and then we can go to g which is the same [Music] thickest string and then the d string [Music] and we can go to the c chord and for the c chord the root is on a but the alternate is still on d [Music] same thing for a minor [Music] a major [Music] i want you to spend a lot of time practicing just the root and alternate with your thumb on a handful of shapes and if you want something to work towards this land is your land by woody guthrie it's a simple three chord song that uses this style i'll put a link down below and just try to practice along using only your thumb and ignore the fingers completely you know just so you can get used to switching chords while your thumb keeps pumping also i have a finger style course finger picking mastery that goes from beginner to advanced teaching you everything you need to be able to play your favorite fingerstyle tunes like dust in the wind landslide blackbird fast car you know a whole bunch just like that and travis picking is it's an intermediate-ish thing and this course will help you build up to that and go far beyond so if you'd like a complete start to finish path starting with stuff way easier than this and going all the way there's a link to that down below as well anyways we're gonna move on to step five now that we're comfortable alternating between the bass notes we can start to incorporate our fingers and make some patterns first i wanna add a pluck at the very start of the pattern at the same time that we pluck the root with our thumb we'll do this on an e minor shape our thumb starts on the thickest string and remember our fingers are on the top three strings so we pluck our thumb and index together and that gives us the e string and the g string but we can just think of which fingers we're using you know thumb and index and then we just keep going with our thumb so one two three four one two three four and now we're going to add our middle finger to beat three so thumb and index together on beat one and then the thumb hits the alternate bass note and then our thumb and middle together on beat three and then the alternate bass note so thumb and finger d string middle finger d string index alternate middle alternate [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and once you're comfortable with that we can start to add some offbeat stuff and this is where it really starts coming together we're going to start with just our thumb alternating between our base notes here you know that's where you should always start nice and slow that's the foundation of travis picking and now just after beat two i want to pluck with our middle finger so we count one two and three and four and one and two and three and [Music] [Laughter] [Music] and now let's add our index finger on b1 so we're gonna add one more now we're gonna add our index finger just after beat three one and two and three if you're having trouble with that we can break it down using our thumb as the foundation or the the guiding point for this whole thing on one we have this and then on two we have that where they're separate so they're together on one then they're separate on two and then they're separate on three and then beat four is just your thumb you know so we're using each of our thumb plucks that's what we're keeping track of and we're thinking okay am i plucking a finger with it or just after it and that's pretty much it so i want you to take your time and do that think about it in those four chunks you know do it at your own pace and now we're going to try it super slow nice and slow on let's do it on a g chord one two three four and we're just going to start by plucking with our thumb one two and then when you're ready you can add some fingers [Music] so i hope with this as a foundation you'll be ready to take on a ton of challenging finger style tunes you know the stuff i played at the beginning those chord melodies like freight train they're just patterns like this but you lift up your fingers a couple times on your cord hand during the patterns and you know maybe add a hammer on here or there and you know it's just one little step further and if you want some lessons on this stuff please let me know in the comments down below i'd love to elaborate on this but for now you have your work cut out you know i need you to practice this stuff and become comfortable and proficient at travis picking through the basic shapes with some basic patterns you know and let me know when you're ready to move on and we can take the next step together if you can't wait i have a finger picking course that starts with the simplest stuff you can finger pick on guitar and it takes it from there just one small step at a time through the intermediate and advanced levels you know it's laid out in a much slower pace than this level i really had to speed things up to you know get this down into a single youtube tutorial and there's a link down below for that if you're interested also don't forget to download the worksheet from my patreon page if you'd like something to guide you through every step of this process that we learned today you know remember that it's fine to go back a couple steps you know start up at the beginning i wouldn't expect that many students to be able to just cut through this entire lesson in one try let me know if you did i'll be very impressed please leave a comment you know if you have i'd love to hear how this is going for you don't forget to check out my free ebook if you need any help with the very basics like and subscribe otherwise have a fun time practicing and i'll see you soon you

Channel: Good Guitarist

Views: 136,760

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Id: ZTPxC0-r54I

Length: 14min 38sec (878 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 03 2021