Hi, how'ya doing, Justin here.
Welcome to this lesson on basic Travis picking.
Now Travis picking gets it's name from the great Merle Travis,
a country guitar picker and his picking style was subsequently stolen
by anyone who played fingerstyle accoustic guitar. It sounds really cool
and it's a great technique to learn.
Now it's basically a little bit more complicated version of the thumb
moving around that we've looked at previously, but in order to help your
development overall as well, we're now going to be applying this to
some barre chords. To really make sure that you got your barre chords good as well.
So, let's get to a close-up, we're gonna be using a C, A-shape barre chord.
Which is (plays) this one, you're gonna see it in the close-up
in a second; I'm gonna show you a close-up first of all of the fretting hand and then
we'll go to the close-up of the picking hand to see what all the fuss is about.
Ok, here we are for our C chord. Now this is of course an A-shape
barre chord,-with the 1st finger on the root note C,- at the 3rd fret,
you don't tuck your 2nd finger like that, I'm just doing it to keep things nice and
simple for you to see. Now, what we want to get used to the idea of here is the 1st
finger moving between the note C and the note G. The pattern we're learning is this:
♪
So, just get use to the idea of this 1st finger moving
♪
Let's check out the picking hand!
The big deal with this Travis picking is the movement of the thumb.
And instead of just alternating between two strings that we've had before
when we looked at our pattern, (♪) our thumb is now gonna go:
5th string, 4th string, 6th string, 4th string.
♪
Which is why we had a look at the 1st finger moving over between the
5th string and the 6th string.
Now but don't use a barre, move your 1st finger!
♪
So, the 1st pattern we're going to look at is basically our very simple pattern 1:
♪
That was the original one,
but now we're gonna be going:
♪
Again, you'd gonna have to probably do this very slowly, I really struggled
the first time I learned this, so I'd expect you guys, to at least have a
bit of fun with it. Really slowly:
together:
Thumb, 1, thumb on the thickest string, 2nd finger, thumb back on the 4th string.
♪
If you're really struggling to hold your barre chord down, and you see a barre chord,
just use our regular open A chord:
♪
you will get the kind of the bottom 2 string ringing out a little bit,
which sounds a bit funny to my ear, but at least you can kind of get used to
the thumb movement there, that's what's really important is,...getting this:
♪
you know, just practicing that is a really good idea for this kind of pattern.
♪
Then introduce the other fingers.
♪
So that's pattern 13.
Pattern 14:
♪
Exactly like our pattern 2,
but with this new Travis Picking.
♪
And of course, you would then start to merge 13 and 14 together.
♪
You can really hear...
♪
just sounds cool.
A lot of the times these guys have a little bit of kinda mute on there as well.
♪
So you get that... I'm just resting my palm of my hand there:
♪
Ok, pattern 15 and 16 where I'm to now,
I'm using a G barre chord
An E-shape barre chord at the 3rd fret.
Hopefully you know how to play that,
now, all of the 6th string root patterns we've checked out so far,
had the thumb bouncing between the 6th string and the 4th string.
♪
Now what we're doing for our Travis picking is, we're going:
6th string, 4, 5, 4 6, 4, 5, 4
So that's where it starts to get a bit more complicated.
♪
Again, you gonna have to just do these really slowly.
It's still then same pattern with the rest of the fingers as we've been looking,
as same as pattern 1 for the C chord, or pattern 3 for the G chord would've been
having this 2nd finger on the beat and then the 1st finger on the end after 2 and then
back to that finger; That pattern.
♪
That's the original pattern we would have had on the G.
Then just try and break out that...
the thumb, into moving over doing to the 5th string.
I would highly recommend doing what I'm doing now.
I've just...doing 6th, 4, 5, 4
Just doing that quite a few times to get the thumb used to moving
onto the 5th string.
♪
And then introduce those other notes.
♪
Again, really slowly and gradually build up the speed is what you want.
Now, pattern 16: exactly the same as our pattern 4 was originally.
There's pattern 4: ♪
And 16 now, we're now just again
moving it onto our Travis picking
♪
I'm sure you're gonna have a whole lot of fun with your Travis picking,
It is a little bit tricky and it takes a little bit of practice, but nearly all
of the things that sound really cool require quite a bit of practice and
this is one of them. I'm gonna show you a cool little country trick as well,
that I think you might enjoy.
I was really stoked when I discovered this thing.
Hopefully you remember your C7 open chord. Right? If you move that C chord up 2 frets
you're on a D chord.
♪
Now, if we use pattern 2:
♪
what I'm doing is moving my 3rd finger
over to the 6th string.
♪
5th string:
♪
6th string:
♪
Sounds pretty cool.
Now, you can do it with the Blues.
Using D, G, back to D
♪
G
It's a really fun little pattern.
A
G
Back down to D
♪
And you can kind of develop this idea quite a lot.
Hope you'll have fun with that,
take care, and I'll see you for
the last lesson in this series,
which is adding in hammer-ons and flick-offs to our patterns.
Just kind of tricky enough already.
And now we're gonna b introducing some new stuff.
So, I'm sure you're gonna enjoy that too.
See you very soon, bye-bye!