She did seem slightly astonished, though, that I didn’t use a plectrum at all. For all those of you who may be unfamiliar with the term, a “plectrum” is a synonym for “pick,” the “pick” being a guitar pick, or mandolin or lute for that matter. I think I shrugged her query off at the time with something like “I just don’t like plecs.”

Couple of months later, one of the grandkids started to take guitar lessons at school – oh, how I wish I’d had that option at the age of eight! – and after a couple of lessons, asked me why I didn’t use a plectrum, because “Sir says you should always use a plectrum!” I tried to explain to him that there are no hard-and-fast rules to playing guitar, sometimes you have to do what feels right for you, rather than what you “must” do according to the book and that there is no single, definitive guitar Bible.

It got me thinking, though. Why don’t I use plecs? Well, here’s a few reasons why……

1 – When I was a beginning guitarist – a real newbie – I lost count of the number of times I lost control of the plec and it went between the strings and straight into the soundhole. I had to stop playing, turn the guitar upside down and shake it all about till I got the plec back.

2 - I hate “pick noise.” If there’s anything I can do anything to eradicate it – and if that means strumming with my fingers – I’ll do it.

3 – They get lost so easily. I can put one in my pocket, but when I want it it’s disappeared. I’m talking about the convenient little pocket on the right hand side of a pair of Levis or Wranglers – they’re the only jeans I can buy because I have a 36 inch inside leg – that’s just above the deep pocket. You’d think they’d be safe in there, right? Wrong! It’s a Bermuda triangle into which plecs might enter but will never be seen again, except in an episode of Torchwood or the X-Files. Or the lint filter of the washing machine.

4 - They might disappear for a while, but then they end up blocking the lint filter in the washing machine. Three hundred quid for a washing machine, seventy-odd quid to call a technician out, a hundred and twenty quid for repairs, for a 50p plec. Priceless…and that’s just the look on the wife’s face when she gets the bill.

5 – I like to play a lot of songs that are fingerpicked. Think “More Than a Feeling,” “Every Picture Tells a Story,” “All Or Nothing,” ”Ticket To Ride,” “Play With Fire” – it’s much easier to play those songs with your thumb and three fingers than playing bass notes, skipping strings, playing the treble strings then playing the bass notes with a plec and then fingerpicking the other three strings with two fingers. Why make something reasonably easy more complicated?

6 – Plecs are expensive. Well, no they aren’t really – but 50p for a little piece of plastic is taking the mickey. When I was a kid, that 50p would buy fish and chips for five and a large bottle of fizzy pop that’d last a week, and enough change left over to buy a local evening newspaper. Buy a plectrum from, say, the Cavern at Liverpool, and it’ll cost you three quid nowadays. Fish and chips for almost a week back then, or a banquet for thirty people!.

7 - Tone’s in your fingers, so I’m told. Why introduce an extra factor into the equation? Your fingers are far more sensitive than a plec – it only deadens the feeling, and adds ever-so-slightly to the reaction time between your brain and your fingers.

8 - They wear your strings out more quickly. You use a sharp, pointed thing on your strings, it’s bound to cause more wear and tear than a comparitively soft fingernail. Even if it is plastic, it’s still going to wear your strings out more quickly.

9 - There isn’t a guitar shop in my town. 30, 000 people and nowhere to buy picks, strings, sheet music, capos, etc etc etc. I am not going to pay £4 for bus fares – the price of 8 plecs – to go and buy a couple of plecs for 10% of the cost of the bus fares. I may not be a genius at Economics, but even I can recognise the real cost of an article as opposed to the cost price. They probably cost about a penny a unit to manufacture – that’s a 98% profit per unit. Like I said, I’m not very good at economics but I do know the difference between making a profit and profiteering. Feel free to correct the maths if I’m wrong…..

10 – I can always borrow one for five minutes if we’re playing “House of the Rising Sun” and I need to hit those strings hard and close to the bridge!

11 – And then I can give it back afterwards – some people are very possessive about their plecs. Some people are very possessive about my plecs, too – I’ve lost count of the number of them I’ve took to my local pub on a jam night and not taken home with me!

12 - I really don’t fancy the idea of going through all that over and over again and waiting for the 32nd re-incarnation…by which time you’ll probably pay as much for a plec as I paid for my Telecaster a couple of years or so back.

13 - Did I mention they get lost too easily?

14 – I’m superstitious so I didn’t want to end with #13.

15 - It’s better to play without a plectrum and get used to not needing one, than to play with one and get dependent on using one: think, “Oh my God! What am I going to do now! I lost my plectrum!” Of course, you know you haven’t really lost it – it’s either on the carpet or gone into the soundhole. Or it’s in the lint filter.

16 - Strings wear out faster than plecs. Strings wear out faster if you’re using plecs. Plecs cost 50p, strings cost £6. Or the cost of twelve plecs. You can play a guitar without a plec, but you can’t play without strings. Even if you own lots of plecs! Do the math – you know it makes sense!

17 - They’re not bio-degradable. You might lose one now and then, but it’ll still be around a thousand years from now. If you believe in reincarnation, approximately sixteen lives from now it’ll turn up again. For about thirty seconds, till you lose it, misplace it or drop it down the soundhole of your guitar or it ends up in that lint filter…..and that’s where I came in.

Looking forward to seventeen good reasons as to why you should use a plec. After all, an intelligent and civil discussion is always fun to read!

Why I Don’t Use a Plectrum was written by Vic Lewis for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

And believe it or not, I got some help with my arrangement from Pink Floyd! I’d been playing around with their song Welcome to the Machine from the Wish You Were Here album and was marveling at how the acoustic guitar part takes a simple line that’s been used countless times and provides more interest to the basic Em chord that the song centers around. Much in the way of Scarborough Fair, I thought.

So, using no capo and working in the key of Em, I came up with the following simple arpeggio to serve as our “theme” for this arrangement:

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Essentially, this is a very easy chord arpeggio played in a very similar fashion to the basic picking pattern of House of the Rising Sun. It’s meant to give the beginner more practice with using all his or her fingers to pick. You want to play the first two notes (on the low E and the D string) with the thumb,  then use your index finger to strike the G string, your middle finger to pluck the B string, your ring finger on the high E and then your middle finger again on the B. This is a very basic picking pattern that most people can start playing very quickly.

To make it more interesting, we’re shifting the second note of the arpeggio higher up the D string each time, moving from E (second fret) to F# (fourth fret) and then to G (fifth fret) before descending to F# again. Essentially, you’re changing the Em to Emadd9 each time you play the F#. And alternating measures of Em and Emadd9 is a lot more interesting than just playing Em over and over again.

Again, I have to stress that this is a simplified version of what happens in Welcome to the Machine. If you’d like to have this sound more like the Pink Floyd song, then you want to drop out the note of the low E string after the first strike and instead substitute a slide along the D string from the first note to the next in the sequence, like this:

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As I mentioned, this is a time-honored technique used by guitarists for ages. In addition to Welcome to the Machine, it features prominently in Joan Baez’s Diamonds and Rust as well as Sad and Deep as You by Dave Mason. And it definitely makes any guitarist sound better.

You can use either of these versions, the “Basic Em Arpeggio” of Example 1 or the “Em Arpeggio with Embellishment” of Example 1B whenever you’ve a few measures of Em to play through. It will repeat at various points during the song. It’s good as an introduction and it will appear at the end of the first two lines.

Speaking of the first two lines, let’s take a look at how they play out:

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The first two measures of this part begin the exact same way as the first two measures of the Introduction. If you use your middle finger to play the F# at the fourth fret of the D string, you can keep it right in place for the Dadd4add9 chord in the third measure. That chord may have a fancy name, but it’s just an open position C chord moved two frets up the neck. You’ve run into that before in many of our Guitar Noise lessons, such as Man on the Moon.

The fourth measure marks the start of a very short and simple walking bass line. Keeping your finger on the E note at the second fret of the D string (and again I recommend using the middle finger but others will work, too), you play the basic Em arpeggio and then move the bass note up to the F# on the second fret of the low E string (use your index finger for that). You then wind up on a G chord to begin the “parsley, sage, rosemary and thyme” line. The G becomes your basic Em again and then at “rosemary” you slide your middle finger up to the seventh fret of the D string and place your index finger at the sixth fret of the G, which gives you a haunting Aadd9 chord. You finish the second line by returning to the four-measure “basic Em arpeggio” of the Introduction.

The third line is fairly simple, just Em, G and D arpeggios, so I threw in a more interesting and complicated arpeggio, which probably should be called a riff or a lick, right at the end:

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Since you are playing a D chord right before this happens, all you have to do initially is remove your middle finger from the high E string for the first three notes. Then remove all your fingers from the neck to play the open B and G strings. Use that free time to get your ring finger or pinky on the fourth fret of the D string.

Then when you start the last line, use the striking of the low E string to reposition yourself for another go at the “basic Em arpeggio.” There isn’t anything here that should give you trouble at this point:

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In order to give this arrangement something more striking, I came up with an outro that is played with only natural harmonics:

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Again, playing the open low E string provides you with more than enough time to position your finger at the twelfth fret to begin this short melodic phrase. You want to practice this section separately (and very slowly!) if you’ve not done a lot of work with harmonics before. Get them to ring cleanly and clearly at a slow pace and you will probably find that playing them at tempo will come with relatively little repetition.

And just to give you a special treat, here’s an MP3 of the first verse of this song sung by Nick Torres. When we recorded this for The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar our thoughts were to try to make it very different from the Simon and Garfunkel arrangement everyone knows. I had done my part with the sparse and simple arpeggio arrangement. Nick did his by delving deeply into the historical soul of the song. When you think about it, giving someone impossible tasks in order to prove his or her love is a bit on the same level as the story of Rumpelstiltskin. So Nick channeled his best Boris Karloff and came up with a very unnerving take on the song, which I hope you find as mesmerizing as I do:

Download a PDF of the complete arrangement (Right-click and “Save as”)

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I hope that you’ve enjoyed this lesson and both the “old school” and the “easy beginner” arrangements of this wonderful song. Scarborough Fair is an excellent exercise in fingerpicking as well as chord shapes. Using the Carthy-based arrangement keeps your fingers on their toes, so to speak, as you have to constantly change picking patterns. And while the picking on the easy version is certainly less complicated, you also get a chance to work in one challenging riff as well as a harmonics-based melody line.

As always, feel free to write me with any questions, comments, or concerns you might have. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

And until our next lesson…

Peace

Scarborough Fair was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

For those of you who have always thought fingerpicking guitar might prove too difficult for you, delude yourselves no longer. Like anything else, it simply takes time, practice, and a good push in the right direction. And while the first two items are pretty much under your own control, I can at least try to help out with the third.

And here to assist with the pushing is another old chestnut, The House Of The Rising Sun, a Public Domain song performed by the Animals waaaaaay back in the sixties (background info on the song here). It’s also been covered by Bob Dylan, Dolly Parton, Woody Guthrie and many other artists.

To prep for this lesson, you might want to read (or reread) Picking Your Poison, or at least the first part, which deals with fingerpicking. Okay?

Just to make matters even more interesting, we’re going to learn two different fingerpicking patterns for House of the Rising Sun. The first will be very straightforward, simply arpeggiating the chords in a very easy finger style. Then we will go on and doctor that version up a bit, throwing in slightly more complex picking which will include a bit of a moving bassline as well as using a standard alternating bassline (which we learned about last time) in a few spots. Are you ready?

Okay, first the chords for the song. And there are five of them! We are progressing right along, aren’t we?

Some people play this song with a regular F major chord instead of an Fmaj7. I have chosen the Fmaj7 chord for two reasons: first, I prefer the way it sounds and, second, it is easier for a beginner to play than a regular F.

Marking Time

And now I also want to say a word about timing. I’ve written this song out in what is known as 6/8 timing. Don’t freak about this. There is a simple explanation and it’s just another one of those things where you’re going to wonder “So what was the big deal about, anyway?”

The time signature (along with the key signature) is one of the first things you encounter when you read music, so you might as well learn just what it means at some point, no? The time signature usually consists of two numbers written one on top of the other, almost like a fraction except there is no line (other than the lines of the staff and that doesn’t count). These provide you with two important pieces of information about the song that you are going to play. The top number tells you how many beats are in a measure (and we learned about measures in Before You Accuse Me). The lower number (lower in position, not (necessarily) the lower number in terms of value) indicates which note is going to count as “one beat.” The vast majority of music you are likely to encounter will be in 4/4 timing:

Sometimes you will see “4/4″ timing written out as “C.” This is short for “Common Time.” As well as “C” there is also a “C”with a vertical line slashing it. It looks like the symbol for a penny and, of course, my keyboard does not have one! This is known, appropriately enough, as “cut time,” or

There are also songs, many marches, in fact which are in 2/4 time. And you have undoubtedly heard songs that use 3/4 timing as well. Waltzes are in 3/4:

Probably eighty-five to ninety percent of all songs are written in either of these two time signatures. 6/8 timing is very similar to 3/4 in that it has the same kind of “triplet” feel. It’s easier to count in groups of threes rather than sets of six, isn’t it?

For right now, all you have to worry about is getting the right count. Later on this year we’ll examine the whys and wherefores (and isn’t that totally redundant?) behind various time signatures. For now, simply notice that each measure is six eighth notes strung together – so your count will be very smooth and totally without incident. There is nothing at all here to trip you up in any way. Promise.

Up And Down

Now, if you’ve read Picking Your Poison, I am going to ask your indulgence as I (momentarily) tell you something different than what I did in the article. The easiest way to start learning to fingerpick is simply to get your fingers going using the simplest pattern possible. We’re going to start the same way I suggested in my earlier article, by making an up and down arpeggio of our chords. To start with, begin with your bass note and play three strings in a downstroke with your thumb (yes, even though I told you to just use your thumb on the lowest three strings! Hang in there with me on this!), then play the first three strings in an upstroke with your fingers. If you can, try to use the following fingers:

on your upstrokes. Getting used to using all of your fingers is usually the hardest part of fingerpicking. Many people seem to have a natural tendency towards just using one or two. But if you get yourself into the habit of employing all of your fingers early on, you have a great chance to find that playing finger style guitar is nowhere near as hard as you thought it might be.

Let’s look at each of the chords and practice picking each of them. Play each chord until you feel comfortable with it. Don’t move on just for the sake of moving on. This will take time for some of you, yes, but the time you spend on it now will pay all sorts of dividends down the road. You will notice that the picking pattern is simply straight eighth notes and that I’ve set them up into groups of three notes apiece, two groups per measure. You’ll also note that I’ve tried to denote the “thumb” notes with downward flags and “finger” notes with upturned flags.

How is it going? If you’re feeling okay with your progress, then the next step, believe it or not, is to go right ahead and play the song! Take your time and just get used to using your fingers and thumbs in a coordinated manner. You will be surprised at how quickly it comes to you.

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See? That wasn’t so hard at all, was it? Are you ready to try it again with a (slightly) more complex fingerpicking pattern? Sure you are!

Getting Back Into Position

Okay, now that you’re used to getting all of your fingers in on the action, let’s tackle this song again. This time, we will concentrate on using our fingers in the more “traditional” way, which means that we should try to keep our fingers on these “targeted” strings whenever possible:

The best way to proceed from here is to take this a measure or two at a time. Remember, whenever possible, make things easier on yourself by taking something that looks very difficult and breaking it down into smaller, manageable pieces. Measure by measure, note for note if you have to.

You’ll notice as we progress that I’ve given the strumming a more interesting bassline. Here, in the first two measures, you can see (and hear) how the Am arpeggio smoothly melts into the C chord:

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Again (and yes, you will get tired of me saying this) take your time with this. Do it as slowly as you have to in order to work all your fingers into the mix. This is not that fast of a song to begin with! But speed without clean and clear notes sounds like so much mud. When you’ve satisfied yourself with the first two measures, move on to measures three and four:

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In these two measures you will notice that since your bass note is on the 4th (D) string, you have to immediately switch to your fingers. Measure four is a particularly good one with which to practice your fingerpicking. You will repeat this pattern (albeit with a different string for the bass note) in the last four measures of the song:

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The only other challenge is in measures seven and eight, which is where the E chord appears for the first time. And now you can see why I had you practice it in the last set of measures. If you spent some time working on that E arpeggio pattern, then you will not find it too difficult to add in a bass note with your thumb on the fourth beat of the measure. Yes, you will be playing two notes simultaneously on that fourth beat – the bass note (B – second fret on the A string) with your thumb and the open high E string with your ring finger. The “trick,” if any, is to be certain to have your E chord formed on your fretboard right from the start. This way you have only one hand to worry about! As you can certainly hear, this particular picking pattern involves an “alternating bassline,” just like the ones in Margaritaville. Here you are alternating between the root (E – second fret on the D string), the fifth (the aforementioned B) and the root again, only an octave lower (the open low E string). And then back up again. You will find you can play this E chord with the alternating bass in a lot of other songs:

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Well, that should take care of everything, I think. Why don’t we put together the whole song?

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I hope you’ve enjoyed this introduction into fingerpicking. Next time out we will dust off another classic and learn another picking pattern, this time concentrating on playing two notes at the same time.

As always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or even songs, riffs, leads or techniques that you’d like to see covered in future Songs For Beginners pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodge@guitarnoise.com.

And stay tuned for some upcoming Songs For Intermediates which will delve into more fingerpicking as well as theory, chord voicings, open and alternate tunings and arrangements.

Until next week…

Peace

House of the Rising Sun was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

More important to you as a guitar student, having to continually shift from one pattern to another is excellent practice for your finger picking. Not only that, but being able to switch patterns on the fly will make your own playing sound much more organic and keep you from falling into the finger style trap of maintaining one single non-changing picking pattern.

So if you’d like to explore some very interesting and intricate fingerstyle guitar playing, come along. This sounds great no matter what type of guitar you play. I’ve played it on classical, acoustic, twelve string and electric (yes, even twelve string electric!) and it comes across beautiful on all.

And while I’m thinking of it, let me also note that in this lesson I will freely interchange the use of the words “measure” and “bar.” They are synonyms, so don’t let that throw you, okay?

For this lesson on Scarborough Fair, we will use the Simon and Garfunkel take on Carthy’s arrangement as our inspiration, but there will actually be quite a few differences that hopefully you won’t even be aware of! On their original recording, the song is played in the key of E minor. Simon uses a capo on the seventh fret, which means that he is really playing in A minor. The voicings that he creates result from both the capo and the choices of the chords he uses.

Since there is a lot of fret movement in this song, I encourage my students to first work on the picking pattern. After all, it’s easier to work on one hand at a time than to worry about both. The best way to approach this is to start with the “theme.” This is the haunting fingerpicking that we’ve talked about before in a number of my guitar columns. This two measure chord progression pops up four or five times during each verse, so nailing it down early in the lesson will provide us with an excellent base from which we can tackle the other parts of the song. Here are the two chords used as the “theme:”

I suggest starting with the second chord in order to work on getting the fingerpicking pattern into your fingers. You will probably want to try one of these two methods:

The song is in 3/4 timing and the pattern consists entirely of eighth notes. So you should be thinking in your head, “one and two and three and…” Let me suggest that you play this chord, the Asus2, with your middle finger on the D string and your ring finger on the G. You’ll understand why when we go on to playing both chords of the theme.

I tend to play this the first way, with my thumb, middle and index fingers but I highly recommend that you at least try to work in your ring finger as well, as shown in the second pattern. As always, start out as slowly as you need to in order to get it all clean. Smoothness is what we’re trying to achieve. This isn’t a fast song by any means. You want there to be a dreamlike quality to your playing.

Whichever picking you choose, practice it until your fingers can play it “on their own,” so to speak. It really doesn’t take all that long for this to happen. Once you settle on a pattern and just play it, your fingers usually fall into it pretty quickly. This is the sort of thing you can do while reading or watching the TV (with the sound off) or talking with someone on the phone or almost anything.

When you don’t have to look at your picking fingers anymore, you’re ready to move on to playing the second chord, the A7sus4(add6). Here, use your middle finger again on the D string and your index finger on the B string. Once again, simply play the chord with your picking pattern until you are satisfied that your fingers know what they are doing. Your notes should be smooth, flowing evenly from one to the next. Only when you feel ready should you move on to playing both chords:

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Because you’ve practiced the picking beforehand, you should find that you can concentrate on your fretting hand. On the neck, keep your middle finger on the D string, as I recommended. Use your index finger to fret the 3rd fret of the B string in the 1st measure. Now simply slide the middle finger to the 2nd fret (still on the D) and play the 2nd fret of the G with your ring finger. Since each measure begins with two notes on open strings, you have plenty of time to switch from one chord to the next. And since your picking hand is on automatic pilot, you will be amazed at how quickly you’ll get the hang of this. Before you know it, you won’t have to watch either of your hands, and that’s the whole point.

Okay, let’s get on with the rest of the song. The intro (bars 1 through 3) starts with the same first chord (and the same first measure) of the theme:

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See how easy it is because you’ve already played it? The picking pattern in the second measure is the same. All that changes is that you add your ring finger to the fifth fret of the A string. Basically, you’re playing a first position C chord that you’ve moved up two frets. At the start of the third measure, slide your ring finger from the fifth fret to the third while removing your other fingers from the neck. The timing here changes slightly, so only play the first three notes of your pattern (thumb, middle (or ring) and index). Then on the third beat play the second fret of the A string with your middle finger, using your thumb to pluck the note. From there, you go right into the theme. Repeat it a few times and you’re ready for the main body of the song itself.

Guess what? Five of the measures of the first line (bars 6 through 10) are the theme! Measure eight is the only different one, so let’s give it a look:

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Playing this all by itself, out of the context of the rest of Scarborough Fair, it probably sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Hey! It’s the first measure of Blackbird! How about that? We already know how to do that. The real trick here is in shifting from one picking pattern (the “theme” pattern) to this new one and then back again. I really can’t stress this enough, but the easiest way to learn how to do this is to slow things down. It’s all striate eighth notes so the timing of the pattern will still be “one and two and three and one and two and three and…” If you take the time to concentrate on count as well as using your index finger to pick the open G string on the “ands,” you should have little trouble. And it’s a very important thing to get set now, as we’ll see in the next line coming up.

The first three measures of the second line (called “Herb”) (sorry, I really couldn’t help myself…) look more complicated than they are:

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Bar 11 is a C major chord, played as an arpeggio. The next measure is an Am arpeggio. Could life get much simpler? This is the third picking pattern of the song. As you can see, I’ve illustrated two ways to play it: one using the thumb, index and middle fingers and the second incorporating the ring finger as well.

The “blackbird’ pattern reappears in bar 13. Here the first beat is a C chord and the last two beats are a D chord, but you play this measure with the same picking pattern we used in bar 8. Then you go right back into the theme once more.

So we’ve gotten through half of the song without even working up a sweat! But, of course, here comes the fun stuff. We’ll need to examine the third line in two parts. Here’s the first:

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They’re throwing everything at us now! Measure 16 starts out with an Am arpeggio, but it’s a totally different one than we’ve used thus far. This one starts with the bass note and then descends from the first string to the third before returning to do a walking bass line from the open A to the C note that starts the next measure. Thankfully, this is another C arpeggio and we have seen it before! Then we go into another “blackbird” pattern where the melody line descends instead of climbs. If you hang on to your C chord in bar 17, you’ll find your fingers already in position to measure 18 this very smoothly. All of this leads us to a much needed rest:

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Okay, so it’s not really a rest as much as it’s a bit of flash. Measure 19 brings the first break in the “all eighth note” timing since the intro. This tends to derail people quickly! Once you realize that it’s just the timing and not you, it shouldn’t throw you at all. The first two beats are self-explanatory. The third beat, as well as the first beat of bar 20, is a quick hammer-on involving two string. If you think of this as an Am7 chord (x02010) and use your middle and index fingers to do the fretting, you might find this to be the part of the song you most look forward to playing!

The final line of the song is almost anticlimactic in comparison, but it’s not without a trick or two:

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Bar 21 repeats the Am arpeggio we’ve done a couple of times while measure 23 is the same “blackbird” pattern from bar 8. It’s the one in the middle that requires a little more attention. I know a lot of people who play this with an open B string, but I prefer to follow the melody line with my guitar, hence the third fret on the first beat (part of a G arpeggio) and the second fret on the third. This is one of those little stylistic things that you can use or ignore.

You wind up the fourth line by gong back into the theme and then back through all the verses. The outro is an exact copy of the intro except that it comes to a stop instead of recycling the theme again. I like to add the twelfth fret harmonic on the first string. Don’t forget that with the capo this is at the nineteenth fret! I use the side of my thumb to play it.

So, here’s the complete package!

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I hope that you’ve enjoyed this lesson. Scarborough Fair is an excellent exercise in fingerpicking as well as chord shapes and truly gives you a taste of how the guitar can be just as grand (no pun intended) an accompanying instrument as the piano.

But Wait! There’s More!

This is a great arrangement, isn’t it? But it’s certainly not the only one. When I decided to include Scarborough Fair as one of the song lessons for The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar, I had to create one that was decidedly easier than this, as the book was meant for a complete beginning guitarist. The idea for this section of the book was to use the basic techniques learned throughout the book to play complete song arrangements. At the same time, though, I wanted it to be interesting and teach a few new simple ideas. Check out the easy version of Scarborough Fair.

Let me also take this time to wish you all a safe and wonderful summer (or winter, if you’re one of our many readers south of the equator!). Please take the time during our “sabbatical” to review any of the (many) old lessons and to write me with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forums or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next lesson…

Peace

Scarborough Fair was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

What’s sometimes overlooked is that it’s very easy to create “chord melody” finger style instrumental pieces out of a blues format. You’ve already done this with our last “Turning Practice into Play” lesson (the Drop D Happy Blues) and in this lesson you’ll have a new piece to add to your single-guitar instrumental music repertoire.

The song for this lesson, which I’m calling the Quick Change Chromatic Blues just to give it a name, is one I wrote specifically for the upcoming Complete Idiot’s Guide to Guitar. Like the Drop D Happy Blues, it’s designed to work on syncopation and timing in general. It’s both easier and harder than the first song in a couple of ways. Easier in that the bass is pretty much a single note (the root note of the given chord) throughout, but the melody provides ample opportunity to stretch and move the fingers about on the fretboard.

There are also some aspects of musicality to address – while the bass is pretty much the same throughout, there should be a bit of distinction between what we would think of as the song’s melody and what will pass as typical blues fills. More on that as we move along…

Let’s address a few basics first: the song is in E major and follows a twelve-bar blues format that most musicians refer to as the “quick change” blues. Typically a twelve-bar blues pattern in the key of E would use the following chords:

Measures 1 – 4: E

Measures 5 – 6: A

Measures 7 – 8: E

Measure 9: B

Measure 10: A

Measure 11: E

Measure 12: Turnaround (meaning getting back to the B so you can start the song again)

In a “quick change” blues, the second measure usually goes to the “IV” chord, which in the key of E would be A. Then the third and fourth measures are back on the “I” chord, which would be E in this example.

Let’s take a look at the first two measures and see how this will play out. Don’t forget that blues is played in swing eighths. If you’ve forgotten about how to do that, don’t worry! We’ve just created a new “mini-lesson help guide” here at Guitar Noise for just this purpose! Go here to get a quick refresher (complete with audio) on swing eighths rhythm.

And when you’re done with that, you can get back to focusing on this song:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Let’s talk a moment here about notes, fingering, melodies and making use of open strings. The E note in the melody line at the end of the first measure can be played at many places along the neck of the guitar. There’s the open high E (first) string, obviously, but you can also play that particular note at the fifth fret of the B string, the ninth fret of the G string, the fourteenth fret of the D string and even the nineteenth fret of the A string if you’re so inclined. Which note is the “right one?”

A lot of that choice depends on you but part of it is simple logic. If you play the first three notes of the melody starting with the G note at the eighth fret of the B string (as shown in the above tablature) it just makes sense to start with your middle finger because then your ring finger and index finger are in perfect position to play the G# (ninth fret of the B) and B (seventh fret of the high E). But you’ve got a choice now as to where to play that E note we were just discussing.

Perhaps the most logical place to play it is at the ninth fret of the G string. Your fingers are, as mentioned, in a perfect place to do so. But I’ve chosen the open high E string for two purely personal reasons. First off, I like the way it sounds. Maybe I’m just an “open ringing strings” kind of guy (that may have a lot to do with starting out on an acoustic twelve-string guitar ages ago), who knows? Letting the note ring out and decay naturally, even while the new phrase of the second measure begins, is pleasing to my ears.

The second reason is a little more practical – using the open string means that I’ve bought myself a bit of time to shift my fingers down the neck for the next phrase of the song. I am not the world’s fastest guitarist by any stretch of the imagination and I like to give my fingers a head start whenever the opportunity presents itself.

And even though this is a reasonably simple song, there’s quite a bit going on here. Take the bass notes, for instance. Even though it’s probably the easiest bass line you could possibly come across, you want to think about just how you want to play it. You can hear on the MP3 in the last example that I use a bit of palm muting on the bass notes, keeping the bass fairly crisp and staccato, in contrast to letting the melody notes ring out. Again, this is my choice and your personal musical tastes may guide you to play it differently.

Turning our attention to the second measure, my original intent with this song was to have it serve as a practical use of the age-old “one finger one fret” exercises that we all used at some point in our playing history. If your index finger plays the first C note (fifth fret of the G string), then you can use your middle finger on C# (sixth fret), your ring finger on the F# (seventh fret of the B string) and your pinky on the G (eighth fret of the B). But again, that’s just one possible approach. You could, for instance, decide to use a series of short slides, sliding the index finger from the fifth fret to the sixth fret on the G and either your ring finger or middle finger to slide from the seventh to eighth fret of the B string. Hammer-ons are another possibility.

The third measure was designed to give beginning guitarists a bit of work on rolling the index finger:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Begin the phrase the middle finger to fret the G (third fret of the high E) and use your ring finger for the G# at the fourth fret. Next you’ll hit the open high E string and let it ring out while you play the C# at the second fret of the B string. To do so, you’ll need to fret the note cleanly with the tip of your index finger. After you’ve done so, flatten out the index finger to get the F# at the second fret of the high E string. You can then either remove your index finger and pick the note of the open high E string or perform a pull-off with the index finger to sound the note.

To get the final note of this phrase, you can simply play it as notated or you can choose to use a slide or a hammer to move from the C# (second fret of the B string) to the D (third fret of the B).

Measures five and six involve bouncing your fingers across the first six frets of the two high strings:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here we’re once again making use of the open strings to move our fingers around. The first time you hit the open high E, shift your fingers so your index finger is positioned at the second fret. Doing so will make it easy to play the A (fifth fret of the high E) with your pinky.

Likewise, use the second strike of the open high E string as a chance to reposition your fingers so that your middle finger is poised over the third fret. This means your pinky will be able to nail the Bb at the sixth fret. Take advantage of the next-to-last hit of the open high E to shift back and you’ll have no trouble getting the F# at the second fret just before this phrase is over.

Be sure to take note that the first three notes of the fifth measure are triplets and not swing eighths. This means that you are supposed to play them evenly through the first beat of the measure. Don’t treat the first hammer-on (which could just as easily be played as a slide, if you prefer) as a grace note – give it its full rhythmic due.

Also be sure to notice that the third note of that triplet is tied, so it is in essence a full beat (the last third of the first beat and the first two-thirds of the second beat). Whenever you find yourself faces with a combination of triplets and swing eighths, be smart and count it out loud to yourself in order to get it right. Here’s how you would count out the fifth measure:

I threw in a traditional blues riff to serve as a fill during the seventh and eighth measures:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

This is probably the trickiest part of the whole song, so if you can work your way through measure seven it’s pretty much smooth sailing from here. You may find using your ring finger for the initial D note (third fret of the B string) to be very helpful. Doing so puts your middle finger right over the second fret so you put it down on the A note (second fret of the G string), hit it and then slide up two frets to the B note. Now your index finger is at the third fret position, which is exactly where you want it to be. Be sure to keep your middle finger in place at the fourth fret of the G string when you hit that D note (index finger on the third fret of the B string) so that you are ready for the slide back down to the A at the second fret. Then you can simply remove the finger normally or perform a pull-off to get the note of the open G string.

Don’t pat yourself on the back just yet, though. You need to hit the open G once more and then immediately hammer your index finger on to the first fret to get the G# that starts the eighth measure. This open G is a true grace note. It’s almost like hitting the open G string was a mistake that you corrected as soon as you heard it.

Take these last two measures slowly and deliberately at first. Don’t even worry about the count as much as getting comfortable knowing how and what your fingers are supposed to do to perform this fill. Once you feel less anxious about how to play it, work on the fill at a very slow and even tempo, counting out the triplets (“one and ah two and ah three and ah four and ah”) as you do so. The hammer-on at the start of measure eight should all happen as you say “one.”

As you gain confidence in playing this riff at speed, back up two measures and play the entire phrase (measures five through eight) at a slow, steady beat and then gradually build up your speed again.

The final five measures may seem a little mundane compared to what you just went through, but hopefully there will be some interesting musical twists for you to enjoy:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You want to start by fingering a B7 chord (x21202) but since you won’t be playing the B or high E strings, don’t even worry about putting any fingers there. After a brief four-string arpeggio, slide the B7 shape, all three fingers, one fret up the neck. Believe it or not, this is C7. With your picking hand, pinch the A and G strings with your thumb and middle finger, respectively, and use your index finger to pick the D string. Then slide the whole shape back to B7 and repeat the picking pattern.

And, having just taken a short break from the “all quarter notes all root notes all the time” bass line, you get right back into it in measure ten. The melody line uses only the notes at either the open B and high E string or the second fret of both those strings. Again, compared to what you’ve done up to this point, you should find this surprisingly easy and painless.

Measure eleven is an interesting demonstration of converging musical lines. The bass notes climb up from E to G# to A to A# and then B at the start of measure twelve while the melody notes move down from E to D (natural) to C# to C natural and then to B again. It’s the first time that the melody is all quarter notes so take care not to speed them up! Inertia can do that to you!

You might find it easiest to finger the second pair of notes in measure eleven – the G# in the bass and the D in the melody – with your middle finger and index finger, respectively. Then slide your index finger down to the second fret of the B string for the C# and use the open A string for the bass note. For the final pair of notes in that measure, use your middle finger for the A# note (first fret of the A string) in the bass and your ring finger for the C (first fret of the B string) in the melody. This allows you to slide the middle finger up to get the B note (second fret of the A string) and also puts you in position to fret the low three notes of the B7 chord again. A little planning certainly doesn’t hurt.

Let’s try out the whole thing and see how it goes, shall we?

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope you’ve enjoyed this little blues number. You should feel free to experiment and work out your own melodies and fills and create solo guitar blues pieces of your own. It’s not all that hard if you remember to start out nice and easy. As you pick up more and more techniques and ideas, your songs will start to reflect your new skills, too.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Turning Practice Into Play #2 – “Quick Change Chromatic Blues” was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

With musicians, just talk about the difference between “practice” and “play.” We all love to play our guitars, but few can hear the word “practice” without experiencing a twinge of some sort. But the reality is that practicing is, at heart, playing one’s instrument. You’re just playing with a specific focus.

Part of the dislike for practice stems from the perception that practice is not “fun” like playing is. But that’s something you can fix with a little imagination on your part. To help, I’ve put together this lesson (and others to follow) that give you a song specifically made up to help practice different techniques or ideas. Since we’ve recently had a focus on finger picking guitar, and since just about everyone loves the blues, your first lesson is a song called Drop D Happy Blues. It may remind you of Taj Mahal’s rendition of Fishing Blues or even Buckets of Rain by Bob Dylan. And that’s a good thing if it does, because then you’ll be noticing how this made-up-specifically-for-practice song is something you can easily do on your own.

We’ll be using Drop D Happy Blues to work on Travis style finger picking as well as to get a better handle on the ideas of syncopation and anticipation, not to mention working on timing in general. This song will also give you a workout with “two finger hammer-ons,” like those used in the Amazing Grace lesson here at Guitar Noise. And if that’s not enough, we’ll also touch on the use of two-string harmony – playing pairs of strings much in the way we did with Bookends. Not to bad from one fairly simple song, no?

And I want to stress that word – “simple” – if for no other reason than to point out you probably liked it! Seriously, I’ve tried to make this first “practice song” one that most of you should be able to handle fairly easily but give it some challenging aspects as well.

Something else I tried to do is to make this a “multi-purpose” arrangement, meaning that it will (hopefully) work equally well as a “chord melody” style song, for those of you who don’t sing, and as an accompaniment, should you decide to create your own melody to sing over the guitar part. And please feel free to do so!

First things first, though, and that means getting our guitars in Drop D tuning. We’ve run into this tuning in a few of our Guitar Noise lessons, such as Neil Young’s Harvest Moon. To place your guitar in Drop D, you want to lower the low E (sixth) string down one whole step to D. You can do this by means of a tuner or even your ear. Just be certain you’re tuning the string lower in pitch and not higher! If you’re using your ear, you can match the new note of D against the normal open D (fourth) string (it will be an octave lower). Matching the twelfth fret harmonic of the newly tuned sixth string to the open fourth string will also do the trick, as will matching the note of the open A (fifth) string to the seventh fret of the newly tuned sixth string.

You may wonder why we’re going through the trouble of using Drop D tuning in the first place! Believe it or not, it’s to make things easier on your picking while you concentrate on other things. Throughout much of the song, you’ll be using your thumb to play a steady four-beat-to-the-measure bass line that simply alternates between the new lowest open D (sixth) string and the regular open D of the fourth string, like this:

For many players the trickiest part of finger picking, especially Travis style picking, is dealing with the picking that gets played with the fingers. More often than not these notes fall on the offbeats, creating syncopation and anticipations in the overall picking pattern. So, as silly as it sounds, you want to take a few moments to get comfortable playing this in a very steady rhythm. Don’t worry about speed but concentrate instead on being able to count and hold the beat steady and sure.

Keeping the beat steady is vital when you add the melody line of the song to the mix. It’s not at all difficult, but if you’re not familiar or comfortable with playing on the offbeat, it may take a few tries to get it right. Here is the first phrase, which is four measures long. Notice that the first and third measures are identical while the second and fourth mirror each other in rhythm even though the notes are different:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I’ve added the count to the first line so you can see and hear how this plays out. For picking, you may find it best to use your middle finger to play any notes on the high E (first) string and your index finger to pick the notes on the B string. But you can also alternate your fingers, using the middle finger and index finger to pick alternate notes. You can certainly also add your ring finger to the mix as well or simply use one single finger to pick all the notes. Which way is best? That depends on who you ask. But it truly doesn’t hurt to be comfortable playing it using any of those finger picking suggestions.

For fretting the notes, though, you’ll probably find it best to start with your index finger on the seventh fret, which will allow you to use either your ring finger or your pinky for the notes at the tenth fret. At the second measure, using the middle finger for the first note (sixth fret of the B string) allows you to hammer onto the seventh fret with your ring finger while keeping your index finger in the perfect position to play the last note at the fifth fret of the high E (first) string. Similarly, in the fourth measure, using the middle finger to start with means you’ll have both the index and ring fingers in the right spot for the second and third notes of the melody.

Another option worth considering is using a slide instead of either the hammer-on or pull-off. You’d start the second measure, for instance, with your ring finger on the sixth fret of the B string and slide it up to the seventh fret. Likewise in the fourth measure you’d use your index finger for the first note (sixth fret of the B string again) and slide the index finger down to the fifth fret of the same string for the second melody note of that measure.

Whichever way you decide to play it (and I, of course, encourage you to try each one), the important thing here is to keep the timing correct. For whatever reason, many beginners seem to associate slurs, such as hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides and bends, with grace notes and tend to play all slurs as grace notes instead of giving them their full rhythmic value. The melody for both the second and fourth measures uses the same rhythm. First there is an eighth note rest, during which the bass note of the open low D (sixth) string is played. Then you get the first melody note during the second half of the first beat. The second melody note (the one created by the hammer-on, pull-off or slide) falls precisely at the second beat, coinciding with the playing of the open D of the fourth string. The third melody note falls between the second and third beat and is held over the final two beats of the measure. Be sure to count it out if you’re worried you’re not getting it correctly.

And just to give you more to practice, here is an alternate rhythm to use for both the second and fourth measures of this first phrase of our song:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here the first melody note of the second and fourth measures falls right on the first beat. The second note falls between the first and second beats and the third note occurs between beats two and three and is held for the rest of the measure.

The first phrase of this song is repeated. In the final MP3 of this lesson you’ll hear me play the first variation one time through and then the second. As always, you should feel free to mix and match as you see fit. Have fun playing around with the rhythm but do make it a point to tell yourself, “I’m playing this rhythm” and do so. After all, you want to be in charge of what you’re playing!

The second phrase begins on the fourth beat of the second repetition of Measure 4, kicking off with a two-finger hammer-on. It goes like this (I’m starting with the third measure of the first phrase, with the second rhythm variation, in the following example):

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

On the fourth beat that marks the end of the first phrase / beginning of the second phrase, you’re playing the open D note of the fourth string with your thumb, as you have been on every fourth beat of every measure up to this point. At the same time you strike the open fourth D string with your thumb, you want to play the open B and G strings. You’ll likely find it easiest to use your middle finger (on the B string) and index finger (on the G string) to do so. After striking all three strings on the fourth beat, you’ll want to perform a hammer-on on the B and G strings at the second half of the fourth beat. Use your index finger to get the D note (third fret of the B string) and your middle finger to get the B note (fourth fret of the G string).

Coming in ahead of the first beat in this manner is called an anticipation. We’ve run into this in many lessons here at Guitar Noise, from Three Marlenas to Man on the Moon. With this particular anticipation, though, you’ll notice that having the hammer-on take place on the second half of the fourth beat gives you a little space in which to get your finger ready on that low G note in the bass.

Using the two fingers on the appropriate notes as outlined earlier puts your ring finger or pinky in place to get the G note at the fifth fret of the low D (sixth) string and having all three fingers in place sets you up to play the rest of the measure with ease. The thumb will still be playing the same strings – the G note on the low D on the first and third beats and the open fourth string D on the second and fourth beats. Then it’s just a matter of adding the fingers.

And that will be a little tricky at first. The second full measure of this second phrase is probably the most involved part of the whole song, so take your time with it. Many players will find it easiest if they use their ring fingers to pick the open high E (first) string, the middle finger to pick the B string and the index finger to pick the G string. But quite a few will also find it simpler to use just the middle finger and index fingers for picking. And there will also be those who prefer to use the index finger to pick all three strings.

You’ll also get a chance to work on your two-finger hammer-ons a bit more as the phrase ends with a shift from the D and B notes to D and A (second fret of the G string). Again, you’ll want to make note of the timing and watch out for the anticipations.

Okay, there’s one final phrase to deal with and, compared to what you just went through, it should be somewhat easier;

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You start with a nice, single hit of the open A string and then play three easy harmony pairs on the high E (first) and G strings. Use your index finger for the high notes and your middle finger for the low notes. If you’d like, you can slide into the first pair of notes, as indicated in the notation and tablature. Doing so is usually easiest from two frets lower on the neck, so you’d start with your index finger on the third fret of the high E (first) string and your middle finger on the fourth fret of the G string.

In the second measure of this last phrase the harmony pairs shift to the B and D strings. Again, use your middle finger on the low notes but go with the ring finger for the higher notes on the B string. And you can also slide into the first pair again if you’d like.

You also get a chance to see if you can hit the offbeat without the aid of the steady bass notes. Notice that the third pair of notes in the second measure falls between the second and third beats of that measure. Finally you end up with the same two-finger hammer-on last seen at the end of the second phrase.

So far, so good! Let’s try putting it all together. We’ll run through the whole thing twice, extend the ending a little bit the second time through and then tack on a short little run of bass notes to give the piece an nice finish:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

That last chord, by the way, is an interesting open string voicing of D9. I hope that you have enjoyed this song lesson, even though it’s a song you’ve not heard before. Hopefully, it kind of sounds like some songs you have heard before!

And do remember the whole point of this exercise was to come up with a song that you could use to practice some different techniques, in this case the focus being Travis style finger picking (complete with playing off the beat and anticipations) and two-finger hammer-ons.  You may not think so at this stage, but this sort of thing you could have come up with on your own if you were so inclined. All I did was to take a few areas of practice and create a way to make that practice (hopefully) be a bit more fun.

If you’re interested in this sort of thing, we’ll try to work out some more “practice songs” for you. It’s easy enough to take other song styles as well as the techniques used in other songs you know and to incorporate them into an interesting and fun lesson. Let me know if that’s something of interest to you.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Turning Practice into Play #1 – “Drop D Happy Blues” was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

I have to say that the first time I knew I needed to play the guitar was when a family friend showed up at our house with her guitar. I watched her move her fingers around the neck (chords) and make the sound with her other hand (strum) and it was the most magical thing I had ever seen. I knew I had to learn how to do that. I started teaching myself from a book, and practicing two to three hours a day. I learned it rather quickly.

This ability to strum and sings is what I call “first base” in guitar. Anyone can get to first base, but not everyone can get there by themselves. Many folks do need the guidance of a teacher to learn to strum, sing, and most importantly, change chords smoothly.

However, many students, even though they take lessons, fail to learn how to strum and sing, and changing chords smoothly without losing the beat. This is because of incompetent teachers… teachers that simply do not know how to deal with someone who seems to be completely unable to move their fingers into the necessary shapes of each chord and move them in time with the beat. The problems always has to do with excessive tension generated in the large muscles of the shoulder and upper body from improper attempts to utilize undeveloped finger and hand muscles. “Correct Practice” is the key to eliminating this tension.

Another overlooked problem for beginners is this: it is exceedingly difficult to sing a rhythmically complex melody over chords that are being played to a steady, basic beat. Teachers take this skill for granted and do not appreciate its complexity, and do not break it down in the proper way for students. I do this very thing in my book, “The Path Level One: Chords & Rhythm”.

I want everyone to know that they can learn to strum and sing easily if they practice correctly. The methods I have created in “The Principles” and “The Path” work for everyone who uses them; no exceptions. There is no longer any reason for anyone to not learn to strum and sing well. The only reason for failure now is simply not knowing about, or not properly using these methods.

When we understand how to practice, becoming a “strummer & singer” can be accomplished in about 3 – 6 months with about 20 min to a half hour a day practice time.

If you are having trouble getting to first base with guitar, I strongly suggest you watch these free videos. They will explain to you why you are having trouble getting somewhere with guitar, and what to do about it.

Free Videos to watch:

• Intro to The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar
• Your First Perfect Lesson
• The Secret of Changing Chords

The Bottom Line on Strumming & Singing:

Time Required: 3 – 6 months with about 20 minutes-30 minutes a day of Correct Practice.

Tools Required: the basic first position chords, basic strum patterns

Recommended Resources:

• “The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar” book
• “The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar” DVD
• “The Guitar Principles Path Level One: Chords & Rhythm” book
• “How to Play the House of the Rising Sun” (online course)
• “Chord Confusion” Free Article
• “Basic Chords” Free Article
• “Practicing Chord Changes” Free Article

Advanced Strumming & Singing:

After learning the basic chords that are played in the first position on the guitar, many players are happy to just keep learning more songs that use those chords. However, sooner or later they will run into songs that require more complex chords, and many of those will be some type of bar chord played up the neck.

Learning these bar chords presents a new technical challenge that stops the progress of many players. Again, ineffective teaching and practice methods are to blame. The correct and best way of learning bar chords is given in my essay “Easy Bar Chords”, which for many who have read it, has enabled them to do bar chords for the first time in their lives.

If we practice bar chords correctly, we can handle them easily with another 6 to 9 months of reasonably consistent practice, spending 20 min to a half hour a day. After that period of vertical growth, we have the possibility of continuous horizontal growth afterwards, learning more songs and using the same chords and strum patterns. Other techniques such as bass runs and hammers and pulls will make our playing even more attractive.

Whether we stick with the basic chords, or continue on to learn the more complex chord shapes, once we learn them, we’ve got them. Like riding a bike, once you can do them, you do not lose your ability to handle chords as time goes on even if you do not play for awhile.

Oh, one more thing – there are two ways to go about learning the advanced aspects of strumming and singing. You can do it alongside learning to read music, or you can work from tabs. Obviously, working from tabs is quicker, and learning to read will give you more musical understanding as time goes by.

I recommend you do both if you have the time. If not, go with tabs. Just make sure your technique is good as you learn these new and more complex movements. Your left hand should be trained with the Left Hand Foundation from “The Principles” (see video). Once you can do the movements taught here, all bass runs and other types of scale work will become easy.

The Bottom Line on Advanced Strumming & Singing:

Time Required: A year or so beyond the initial start up time to reach “First Base Strumming & Singing”

Tools Required: the basic movable (barre chords) basic strum patterns, bass runs.

Recommended Resources:

• “Easy Bar Chords” Free Article
• “The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar” book (the Left hand Foundation Exercises)
• “The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar” DVD (the Left hand Foundation Exercises)
• “Hammers & Pulls According to “The Principles” ebook
• Mel Bay Note by Note: According to “The Principles” online course (teaches note reading also)
• “How to Play the House of the Rising Sun” (online course)

Fingerpicking

If we wish to expand our abilities to include fingerpicking as well as strumming our chords, that is much more demanding. Players who have acquired too much tension in the arms and hands from bad practice will find it nearly impossible to control their fingers as they try to learn fingerpicking.

The right hand exercises in “The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar” will give you real control and independence in each finger, which will open the door to real power and speed with the right hand fingers. From there, the “Guitar Principles Classical/Fingerstyle Course” will give you a wonderful foundation in all the basic right hand techniques and patterns you will need. Then, you can easily learn whatever you wish, and will be able to effectively use all the other resources for fingerstyle/classical guitar on the market.

If we know how to practice correctly, wonderful fingerpicking ability can be gained in 6 months to a year with about 45 minutes to an hour a day.

The Bottom Line on FingerPicking:

Time Required: 6 months to a year, 45min -1hr a day

Tools Required: ability to control each finger independently of the others, keeping hand and arm tension to a minimum. Learning a number of standard picking patterns and runs to use between chords.

Recommended Resources:

• “The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar” book (FingerStyle Foundation Exercises)
• “The Principles of Correct Practice for Guitar” DVD (FingerStyle Foundation Exercises)
• “The Guitar Principles Classical/Fingerstyle Course” (online course in 6 parts)
• “How to Play the House of the Rising Sun” (online course)

The Learning Curve of Various Styles of Guitar (Part 2): Strumming & Singing was written by Jamie Andreas for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

And welcome to the long-overdue return of the Guitar Noise Podcast series. Since the May 2010 Guitar Noise Topic of the Month is Finger Picking (or it will be once May starts!), it seemed like a good idea to show how you can add simple techniques you already know from single note playing and strumming to spice up your finger picking playing as well.

In this Guitar Noise Podcast, we’ll start with a simple Travis style picking pattern with the G major chord and then add two interesting twists to it, one that will make you sound a little like Gordon Lightfoot and the other like Paul Simon. I hope you enjoy the lesson.

As always, please feel free to post your comments or to send them to me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com Thanks for listening and I look forward to chating with you again soon.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Guitar Noise Podcast #28 – Getting Beyond Basic Finger Picking was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

And that’s just as well, too, for there are certainly more than enough versions of just about every single holiday song known to civilization. Today, I’d like to offer up a “fingerstyle / chord melody” take on I’ll Be Home for Christmas, a song from the 1940′s that’s been sung by almost everyone, it seems. Hopefully our Guitar Noise arrangement will become part of your holiday song repertoire.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Before we start in, though, I have to digress slightly concerning two things. First, I’ve been playing this song for ages, but when I first started to work up an arrangement of it, I had no sheet music as a guide. Instead, I relied on memories of the various versions I’d heard. As a result, there are all sorts of ‘freedoms” taken, particularly with the time signatures in this arrangement. But I’m hoping that will make it an even more interesting lesson.

The second thing is that I incorporate the “verse” of the song, and you may not even be aware that it exists. We know many pop songs from the middle of the 1900s simply from their choruses, which actually seem to be whole songs. But quite often, these songs had a single verse that served more as what we’d think of today as an introduction. Then everyone would join in on singing the chorus. And, more often than not these days, it’s only the chorus that most of us know.

Our arrangement of I’ll Be Home is in the key of A. And though the song is written in 4/4 timing, we’re going to be approaching it in a different manner. In 4/4 timing, the two lines of the verse goes like this:

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Back when I was putting this all together, the phrase of lyric gave me a strong impression of 3 / 4 timing. More like this:

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Because I’d gotten this rhythm into my head all those many years ago, I pretty much think of the whole song in terms of threes and triplets instead of fours, as you’ll see when we get to the chorus.

For now, though, let’s take a look at those first two lines again, done up in a “fingerstyle chord melody” way:

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First things first – I’ve moved the melody up an octave to place it totally on the first two strings of guitar. This means that you’ll have a bit of work ahead, changing chords at various places on the fretboard. But even this early in the verse, we’ll be running into two important chord shapes that will recur throughout the song. The initial Dmaj7 chord is made by placing the index finger at the ninth fret of the high E (first) string, and then forming a diagonal line with your middle finger on the tenth fret of the B string and your ring finger on the eleventh fret of the G string. The open D string serves as our bass note.

We then switch to full-barre Em7 chord shapes for the next three measures. Using this fingering of barring across all the strings with the index finger and then adding the ring finger to the A string two frets up, we create C#m7 (barre at ninth fret, ring finger on the eleventh fret of the A string), Bm7 (barre at seventh fret, ring finger on the ninth fret of the A string), and F#m7 (barre at second fret, ring finger on the fourth fret of the A string) and our free fingers to get the other melody notes. Your index finger will easily reach the tenth fret of the B string when playing the C#m and your pinky should have no problems with either the tenth fret of the B when playing Bm7 or the fourth fret of the high E (first) string when playing the F#m7.

The “diagonal line shape” of the Dmaj7 chord shows up again in first measure of the second line for the Bm7/D chord, although you may not immediately recognize it. Before you worry about playing the notes shown in the tablature, set your fingers for a typical “beginner’s Bm” chord – index finger on the second fret of the high E (first) string, middle finger on the third fret of the B string, and ring finger on the fourth fret of the G string. Once you’ve gotten those fingers in place, then put your pinky on the fifth fret of the high E (first) string to get the A note of the melody line. Once you’ve played it, you simply remove the pinky and all your other fingers are in place for the last chord of that measure.

Being able to read chord shapes as tablature is not something that many guitarists pick up easily and we’ll be spending a bit of time throughout 2010 working through this subject. Hopefully, though, this shows you why it’s an important skill to develop.

Recognizing chord shapes can often make changing from chord to chord easier as well. For instance, just looking at the chord charts and tablature for switching from this “beginner’s Bm” to the following E7 may seem daunting, all it really involves is moving two fingers. Your middle and ring finger are already where they should be, so you shift the index finger to the second fret of the D string and then drop your pinky onto the fourth fret of the high E (first) string.

If you want to add a bit more bass, you can also flatten out your index finger across the second fret of both the D and A strings, giving you the fingering of 022434, which allows you to play the chord across all six strings. You want to be careful with this, though as you need the note of the open high E (first) string as part of the melody line. You can achieve this by tilting the index finger into the middle of the fretboard, clearing the first string completely, or you could always reach the same note at the fifth fret of the B string with you pinky.

The second half of the verse starts out the same but then finishes with a group of interesting chords, not to mention a brief change of time signatures:

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Something both cool but somewhat frustrating and unnerving about is that any one specific combination of notes can turn out to be a part of many, many possible chords. If I were to give you the notes C, E and G, as an example, you could say that they are a C major chord, but they could also be part of Am7 (A, C, E and G), Fmaj9 (F, A, C, E and G) or many other chords. Most jazz players use only three or four strings in order to create chords, so there are all sorts of ways to identify them.

Since Bm, or Bm7 if you will, is the focal harmonic point of the first measure in the second line here, I’ve named each of these chords as extensions of Bm or B. Shifting from chord to chord may seem difficult at first, but using your index finger as an anchor on the lowest fret and shifting it up the neck (from the second fret to the fourth and then to the seventh) will help you make smooth transitions. Having your index finger on the seventh fret for the B13 also puts you in perfect position for the E9.

This part of the verse can be done very freely in terms of timing. You can make it incredibly melodramatic if you’d like, especially if doing so helps you buy time between the chord changes!

Part of the charm of this arrangement, of most chord melody style arrangements for that matter, are getting ringing strings and overtones wherever possible. That’s why you’ll find many times I’ll opt for a chord voicing involving open strings when I can.

With the “verse” out of the way, we can concentrate on the “chorus” part of I’ll Be Home for Christmas, which is the part you’re probably really interested in, anyway. Like the verse, the original chorus is written in 4 /4 timing. But while there is a strong pulse on each beat, and again this is to my ears and may not work for you, there is also a distinct feel for triplets in the accompaniment. It’s got the same kind of feel as The House of the Rising Sun. So I’ve worked out the chorus in 6 / 8 timing to accommodate this feel. If nothing else, it keeps me from writing out a lot of triplet notation!

I could have just as easily written this out in 12 / 8, the way many blues songs are written out, but I simply found 6 / 8 more convenient. And, as you’ll see and hear, it does make coming up with an easy, yet interesting accompaniment a breeze.

Essentially, the chorus can be broken down into four parts, each of which goes with a line of lyric:

I’ll be home for Christmas you can count on me
Please have snow and mistletoe and presents on the tree
Christmas Eve will find me where the lovelight gleams
I’ll be home for Christmas if only in my dreams

To make matters even easier, the first and third lines are, essentially identical in terms of melody and chords. So we’ve only three parts to learn! Here’s the first:

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The first measure involves what some people call the “classical guitarist’s A chord,” although folks like Pete Townsend use it a lot. Essentially, it’s a partial barring of the second fret, covering the four high strings with the index finger, and then adding the pinky to the fifth fret of the high E (first) string to get the A note of the melody. You then slide the pinky down to the fourth fret at the end of the measure.

For the most part, I tried to make the accompaniment be a simple “down and up” arpeggio, again much like the lesson on The House of the Rising Sun. There will be places where this will have to be changed, but if you can get used to starting with your bass note and (including that bass note) play three strings down and then three strings back up, you should be fine.

An Adim7 sets the stage for the second measure. Slide your index finger, still barring the first four strings, up to the fourth fret and add your middle finger to the fifth fret of the G string while dropping your pinky onto the seventh fret of the high E (first) string. Use your ring finger to fret the A note at the fifth fret of the high E later in the measure.

The E note of the open first string is the melody note for the word “Christmas,” so I use most of the barre chord version of the Bm chord but leave that first string open. This is actually fairly easy to do if you don’t think of it as a barre chord, but rather as an Am chord slid up two frets. Plus, then your fingers are in shape for the E chord that comes next.

If case one of the subtle subtexts of the many lessons here at Guitar Noise may be eluding you, let me make it clear: you don’t have to let chord names freak you out. There is very little about music that you can’t figure out, provided that you keep your head and don’t panic. For instance, you may look at the chord in the next measure, C#m7(b5) and have a heart attack. But there’s no reason for it. C#m is C#, E and G#. Adding the “7″ means adding the note, B, to the chord. “b5″ indicates that you lower the fifth of the chord, G# in this instance, a half-step, turning it into G. So the notes of “C#7(b5) are C#, E, G and B. That’s three open strings plus a C# thrown in somewhere. No reason whatsoever to panic that I can see.

You could make this more interesting, not to mention slightly harder to finger by going with a fingering of X42000, but since you’re fingerpicking arpeggios, make it easier on yourself by skipping the D string entirely.

Likewise, the following chord, F#7(b9) may seem unwieldy, but all you’ve got to do is to barre across the second fret again with your index finger and then add your middle finger to the third fret of the G string and your ring finger, just for a moment, to the third fret of the high E (first) string. Then you only need stand the index finger up at the second fret of the A string to put you in perfect position for the Bm7 of the last two measures.

Let’s move along to the second line of the chorus:

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Things start our relatively easy, with three simple open positions before moving up the neck for the F#m7 in the fourth measure. But even this isn’t that hard if you stop to think and prepare for a moment. The chord immediately before it, Amaj7, shares the same shape and fingering on the B, G and D strings, so if you set yourself up to play that Amaj7 without your index finger (pinky on the second fret of the B string, middle finger on the first fret of the G string and ring finger on the second fret of the D string), then you only need slide the whole shape up to the sixth and seventh frets and drop your index finger down on the fifth fret of the high E string to complete the chord.

And if you plan out your arpeggios, you don’t have to play the whole B7 barre chord, either. For all intents and purposes, you can get away with leaving the A string clear (other than the index finger needed to barre the seventh fret, of course!) and just use your middle finger on the eighth fret of the G string. Plus your ring finger for the melody note at the ninth fret of the B string when it comes along. The last two measures of this section are a repeat of the third and fourth measures of the first line.

After repeating the first line again, you’ve only one more to go:

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This brings us back to the two basic chord shapes we covered in the “verse” section. The Bm7 (based on the Em7 shape but barred at the seven fret) we remember as the third chord of the song. The “diagonal line” chord is played across the fifth, sixth and seventh frets of the high E (first), B and G strings, respectively, to create Dm. Adding the pinky to the seventh fret of the high E (first) string will give you the melody note.

Then comes our old friend C#m7(b5) and since that’s nowhere near as scary now, why not try stretching our hand a bit and using the x42000 fingering for it? Follow that up with a full F#7 (index finger barred across the second fret, middle finger on the third fret of the G and ring finger on the fourth fret of the A), another Bm7 and another diagonal Dm and you’re just about finished. We’ll close with a nice open string version of Amaj9, fingering the sixth fret of both the D and G strings.

If you want to have an ending with a little more pizzazz, try replacing the final two measures with a reprise of the first four measures of the “verse” section, only try it in 6 /8 timing to give it a little more interest. I’ve not tabbed this out, but I play it in our final version. And just in case you were wondering, I’m playing all the MP3 examples for this lesson on a classical guitar.

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As always, I hope that you had fun with this arrangement of I’ll Be Home for Christmas. It’s one of my favorite seasonal songs and I hope you enjoy it as well. It may take you a little longer to get confident about playing it, but I’m sure you’ll manage it with just a little bit of practice, patience and perseverance.

And, again as always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

I’ll Be Home for Christmas was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Liner Notes: Bob Dylan

Born in Duluth, Minnesota in 1941, Bob Dylan has released over sixty albums and compilations. No other songwriter from modern times has had as much cultural and musical significance. We have several lessons on the music of Bob Dylan for easy guitar.

• If Not For You
• Tangled Up In Blue
• Simple Twist of Fate
• Buckets of Rain

For a complete list of lessons, articles and reviews check out our Bob Dylan artist page.

So, instead let me say that this lesson, a single guitar arrangement of Lay Lady Lay, a song a lot of people single out as one of their favorites of Bob Dylan, is definitely going to pose some challenges. But rest assured these aren’t insurmountable challenges.

Let’s dispense with the formalities and get right down to work, then, okay?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Notice my use of the word “work.” Unlike many people, the word carries no bad connotations with me, and that may be why I have no problem expecting learning any song to involve some work. And that’s after close to thirty-five years of playing. There is little in life that is not going to involve some degree of work. So if you have a problem with the word “work,” you’re kind of setting yourself up with a ready excuse as to why you can’t do something. So now who’s being discouraging?

If anything else, I hope that those of you reading and learning from all the lessons and articles here on Guitar Noise understand and appreciate that nothing about learning the guitar involves magic, anymore than it truly involves me. You are the one putting the effort into learning and making things happen. I’m not much more than a glorified tour guide.

Perhaps a better way of putting it is that even though I’ve done a bit of work for you, putting things in order and arranging them as nicely as possible, you’ve got to also put in the work required for you to make the music happen. I’ll do my best to talk you through the stages as we go. Essentially, we’re going to take something that is slightly difficult and then deliberately make it more difficult in order to get better at our barre chord technique.

First off, let’s deal with some necessary preliminary steps. Structurally, Lay Lady Lay is made up of three verses. Each verse has an “A” section (the “lay lady lay” part) that consists of a four chord progression that repeats itself without the lyrics. This “A” section is then repeated as the second line of the verse and is followed by, a “B” section that lasts for two lines before the verse finishes with one last repetition of the “A” section.

If I go to a book of Bob Dylan songs or get the chords off the Internet or even just figure things out myself by ear, this is what I would come up with for the first verse:

You can see how the verse breaks itself into the AABA pattern.

Now, I don’t know about you, but just seeing that C#m listed there is enough to make me think about changing to a key with easier guitar chords. We’re obviously in the key of A major (although there is a very interesting thing going on that we’ll discuss in a moment), and that’s usually going to involve a few barre chords. I’m counting three here, C#m, Bm and F#m, and even though there are ways of getting around these particular chords, I’m still thinking things might go better with a change of key.

Fortunately, I have read Turning Notes into Stone, which explains how to transpose and I’m ready to change all of the chords to their appropriate matches in the key of G:

But this doesn’t help all that much as now I’ve got to deal with both Bm and F. I have gotten rid of one barre chord, since the F#m in the key of A is now an Em in the key of G, so I guess that’s a small victory. Plus, if I throw a capo on the second fret (as I do in all the MP3 examples for this lesson), then I’m back in the original key of A.

Better yet, I know ways of playing the Bm and F chords that don’t involve full barres. Even better, using these particular chord voicings create a natural descending bass line, even though it’s all way up on the D (fourth) string. Let’s start with G, and then use a “four string” version of Bm where the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string is the bass note. Most people will finger this chord with the index finger on the second fret of the high E (first) string, the middle finger on the third fret of the B string, the pinky on the fourth fret of the G string and then the ring finger on the fourth fret of the D. Technically speaking, we can call this chord, “Bm/F#” even though most chord books will list it simply as “Bm.”

From there we’ll go to the typical “beginner’s F” chord, you know, the one where you lay your index finger across the first fret of both the high E (first) and B strings, while your middle finger is at the second fret of the G string and your middle finger gets the third fret of the D string.

Finally, there’s the basic open position Am chord, but in keeping with the walking descending bass line, let’s not play either the low E (sixth) string or even the open A string and let the E note at the second fret of the D string be our bass note.

Putting all this together and using a basic Travis style finger pattern, such as those we’ve used in other lessons, we can put together something like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Think of this particular pattern as a slight variation of the pinch that you used in the lesson on Dust in the Wind. Because we’re working with sixteenth notes, the thumb will be counting off both the “beat” (the “numbers”) as well as the offbeats (the “ands” between the numbers) while the fingers will hit the notes in between. So, following this last example, start with a pinch (both finger and thumb) of both high and low E strings on the first beat and then pick the D string with the thumb on the “and” between beats one and two. This will be followed by a hit of the B string and then the high E (first) string with the fingers (usually index and middle, respectively) and then the thumb will get the G string on the “and” between beats two and three.

This is not an easy pattern to get right out of the box, so don’t get discouraged if it doesn’t go well at first. I’ve included a “variation” that uses the thumb on every beat and offbeat and for some of you this might prove a helpful starting place. But this will sound better once you get the hang of it, so don’t give up! As with all finger picking patterns, the hardest step isn’t usually getting it into your fingers – it’s being able to stop and then switch to another pattern when you want to!

When you switch to the following chords, your bass note will now be on the D string, so your first pinch will be with the thumb on the D and a finger on the high E (first) string, while your second note with the thumb will be on the G string. And this pattern will hold throughout the remaining three chords.

Before we move on, let’s take a minute and look at this progression. We go from G to Bm and then to F and Am. In the key of G, G is obviously the root (the “I” chord) while Bm is the “iii” chord. It’s not the strongest of progressions, in fact it’s very gentle and subtle and maybe that’s why Dylan went with it as it fits the mood of the song very nicely. The next chord, F, may seem out of place, but in the key of F, F is the root (“I”) and wouldn’t you just be surprised to find out that Am is the “iii” chord? Basically what’s going on here is that we’ve got one “I – iii” progression followed by another. And since Am is also the “ii” chord in the key of G, going from Am to G would be “ii – I” in our original key, another very gentle sounding cadence. I only mention all this because I find this sort of thing interesting, not only from a theory point of view, but also from a songwriter’s perspective.

Anyway, you can, if you’d like, use this pattern and these chord voicings for the entire song and consider the lesson over. Simply skip down to the final example and you’ll find all the chords in a nice “cheat sheet” format and you’d good to go. But if you’d like to get some more work and to, hopefully, get better at playing, then come along and let’s tackle some barre chords.

Why? Because while it’s entirely possible to play guitar all your life and not ever use a single barre chord, you are ultimately limiting much of what you can play. And the only way you’re going to get better at them is to use them. Sitting around talking about how you can’t do them will certainly prove yourself right, but you deserve to treat yourself better than that.

And it’s one thing to strum barre chords, especially on an electric guitar. Try finger picking them on an acoustic if you’d like to get better at them in a hurry!

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This example uses essentially the same finger picking pattern as before, but every chord voicing, with the exception of the Am, is a barre chord. Fortunately, these barre chords are relatively similar and also very close together on the fretboard, so this makes things a little easier for you as you switch from chord to chord.

On the G chord, your index finger barres all six strings at the third fret while your middle finger is on the fourth fret of the G, your pinky is on the fifth fret of the D and your ring finger is on the fifth fret of the A string. If you think about it, your fingers are forming the same shape as the open position E chord. And thinking about your fingers being in this specific shape will help you a lot as you shift from chord to chord.

When changing from the G to the Bm, you want to slightly raise your index finger so that you can shift it down to the second fret (try to stay across all six string even though you’ll only be picking five of them) and, as you shift your index finger, also “relocate” your E shape so that it’s now an “Am” shape, that is, try to transfer all your fingers at one go instead of painstakingly placing them one at a time on the fretboard. You don’t need me to tell you that this is going to be, in all likelihood, a big train wreck the first few (or few dozen) times out. But as your fingers get to understanding what you want them to do, they will seemingly get better a little at a time until you should find that you are handling the change fairly well at a slow speed. And, as you already know, more speed will come with more repetition.

Moving from Bm to F involves more of the same, only this time you’re going back to the E shape. And use the Am at the end of the progression as a chance to catch your breath before doing it all again.

I cannot stress enough that this will probably take most of you some time to get down. Hopefully you understand that something like this is worth the effort on your part. One day you will wake up and think that you just play barre chords by magic, but the fact is that all the time that you’re spending now on this progression will play a big part of that seeming magic.

Again, you can feel free to call it quits here. But if you want to step up to the next challenge, then by all means, let’s continue:

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At first glance, this doesn’t seem all that different from our last example, but it is in a very important way. The first chord, G, is in open position and the second and third chords (the Bm and F) are barres. So that means you’re going to be working on making the shift from the open position G to the Bm barre. To make it even more interesting, I’ve put the F# note at the second fret of the low E (sixth) string, the bass note (I told you earlier there was a reason to barre all six strings on this chord!), so that the bass line now mimics our original “open position” bass line from Example 1. It’s simply an octave lower on the Bm, F and Am chords.

If you play your G chord with your index finger on the second fret of the A string, then you’ve got a head start on making the transition to the Bm a little smoother as all you’ll need do is to stretch it out over the six strings at the second fret. Also take advantage of the fact that your finger picking pattern uses a lot of open strings, which will help you to get a bit of a jump in making the chord change.

Even after all the work you did on the “barre chords only” progression of Example 2, this is going to take more energy and effort on your part. I can only tell you that it will, in the long run, be worth every bit of it. I hope you can trust me on that!

One of the (many) reasons for all this dealing with barre chords is that the technique of barring can help you out a lot even when you’re not playing barre chords. Confused? Well, let’s look at our next example to shed a little light on that:

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This latest pattern is a dead ringer for our first pattern but I’ve decided that I’d like my single guitar arrangement of Lay Lady Lay to contain some of the textures of the pedal steel guitar that accompanies Dylan in the original recording. Absurd, you say? Well, I certainly cannot make my acoustic sound like a pedal steel, even on a good day. But by mimicking some of the notes and licks by use of a hammer-on, such as at the end of both the Bm and F chords here in this example, I can give the listener a bit of the flavor of the pedal steel guitar and hope that his or her mind fills in the rest.

The easiest way of getting these particular notes, you might notice, is by raising and lowering my index finger, just as if I were barring the second fret (for the Bm) or first fret (for the F). And if I want to emphasize the very low bass notes, as we did in Example 3, this would be the only way of accomplishing this. So now you’ve got another excellent reason for keeping up with the barre chord work.

Okay, just to keep this lesson from being too one dimensional, let’s tackle the “B” section of the verse:

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In order to give this section a bit of its own identity, I’ve changed the picking pattern to more of a “straight down and up” sort of arpeggio while keeping the rhythm of the finger pattern of “Section A.” Note the use of the E (second fret of the D string) as the first bass note in the Em chord. This mimics the bass player in the original recording. Playing the B at the second fret of the A string for the second of bass note of the Em chord makes a nice lead down to the G (third fret of the low E (sixth) string) that starts the second measure.

This section also contains what most folks think of as the “signature lick” of this song, namely the little ornamentation at the end of the second measure. To play this, start by fingering an Am7 chord (x02010) and pinch only the D and B strings (the ones where your fingers are on). After performing the pinch, pull-off your fingers on both strings. Remember that you always want to tug down a little when you make a pull-off. That’s what gives you a good clear sounding of the notes of the open strings.

On the original recording, there is a slight variation on this lick, which I’ve included in our last example. To play this, first you’ll need to form a different voicing of Am7 (x02013) that uses either your ring finger or pinky on the third fret of the high E (first) string. Once you’ve formed your chord, play a “three finger pinch,” plucking the D string with your thumb, the B string with the index finger and the high E (first) string with your middle finger and then perform the pull-off on the D and B strings as before while leaving whichever finger you have on the third fret of the high E (first) string, firmly in place.

This signature riff, as well as the “multi-finger pinch,” shows up again in the bridge:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I should note that I deliberately used both the finger patterns from “Section A” and “Section B” for the bridge, but you can feel free to go with either one or the other. Truth be told, I originally wrote it all out in the style of “Section B” but found myself playing the first measure of the bridge in the style of “Section A” and subsequently re-wrote the music! Sometimes your fingers just do what they want to do!

In the second and sixth measures, you’ll find three block chords (D, Em and G) that require a multi-finger pinch. The easiest solution is to use the thumb on the bass note (the open D string or the open low E (sixth) or the G at the third fret of that same string), the ring finger on the high E (first) string, the middle finger on the B string and the index finger on the G string. Another possible method is to use any finger to “sweep’ across all three high strings in an upstroke motion while playing the bass note with the thumb. Both techniques work fine.

In the final measure of the bridge, I throw in another little guitar lick, taken directly from the original recording. This involves playing the open high E (first) string, and then playing the D note at the third fret of the B string before pulling off to sound the open B. After all the work you’ve done so far, this should prove to be a snap.

To put the finishing touches on our arrangement, let’s add an outro:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Here the chords simply ascend up the G major scale, going from G to Am to Bm and then to C. Surprisingly, this is the first use of this chord that normally shows up every two to three chords in the key of G!

This entails a little more complicated picking pattern than before, but you can also use either the pattern from “Section A” or “Section B” of the verse if you’d prefer. Try, though, to pinch the first notes of the chord that I’ve written out as it makes for a very nice melodic line to close the song, moving from the open B string to the C note at the first fret to the D note at the third fret and then to the open E of the first string. Once there, use your pinky to get the G note at the third fret of the first string and then slide the pinky up to the seventh fret for the final note. When you’ve reached it, you’ll also play the G note at the third fret of the low E (sixth) string with your index finger. This is a bit of a stretch and normally I wouldn’t think about trying it, but having the capo at the second fret makes this a lot easier and, again, it mimics the slide guitar part played on the original recording.

And now that we have all our pieces in place, let’s try out the whole thing:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

I hope that you’ve hung out and tried the various exercises and techniques involved in this lesson. Part of this, obviously, is meant to both encourage and light a fire under you to get you going on feeling more comfortable with barre chords. Part of it is selfish, as well. We’re going to be doing some lessons in the very near future on Jack Johnson songs that will actually be less involved than what you’ve just accomplished and I don’t want to have to put all of these songs in the “Intermediates” section when you truly would be able to handle them if you simply worked a little on them with some concentrated effort.

Anyway, I also hope that you had fun with it as well. This is a beautiful song that you’ll probably find yourself playing over and over again and wondering what all the fuss about barre chords was about in the first place!

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Lay Lady Lay – Bob Dylan was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

I wrote this little ditty for those of you who are looking to expand beyond “background finger-picking.” The idea is to get you playing your single guitar like a small combo band, complete with a soloist for the melody, a bass for the bass lines (of course!) and someone to fill in the middle with chords and/or harmonies.

To be able to master this, you should already be familiar with your basic chords and comfortable to move fingers around to accommodate changes in their fingerings.

Take a look at the complete arrangement and listen to it on the midi file.

• Download pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

This song incorporates a mini melody, a basic bass line, and little harmony within it. I wrote it to only have one chord function per measure. This makes it easier to understand how it’s put together.

It also helps that this is basically in a twelve-bar blues format (you can find out more about that by reading the Guitar Noise lesson on Before You Accuse Me). So you can see that you’ll be using these chords in these measures:

Measures 1 through 4 – G

Measures 5 and 6 – C

Measures 7 and 8 – G

Measure 9 – D

Measure 10 – C

Measures 11 and 12 – G

A few notes on the Picking Hand:

The thumb handles the bass line. On any measures with “G” – you’ll pluck Strings 6 and 4. Measures 5 and 6 (with “C”) – you’ll pluck Strings 5, 4, 6 and then 4 again. The measure of D will be just the fourth string and Measure 10 (C again) will be just String 5.

Take a listen to the example without the melody and harmony.

• Download pdf (Right-click and “Save as”)
• Download midi (Right-click and “Save as”)

View the pdf file of just the Bass part and then compare it to the arrangement.

By using your index and middle fingers, decide which ones will be most comfortable to pluck the notes for the harmony and melody. I would approach a measure at a time. I wrote it in this fashion. As you can tell with the midi file, there is a bit of a shuffle in the rhythmic structure. Add that after you are comfortable with each measure.

E-mail me and let me know if you would like a video of me playing this song.

My e-mail: petersimms.guitar@gmail.com

Have Fun! … Peter

Dusty Roads Two Step – A Fingerstyle Song by Peter Simms was written by Peter Simms for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

So I’m going to make a concerted effort to put together more of these arrangements, if for no other reason than I enjoy them immensely, too!

To kick off this new set of song lessons, we’ll fall back on our extensive Beatles’ catalogue of material and dust of the George Harrison gem, While My Guitar Gently Weeps, originally released on what folks like to call “The White Album.” So let’s get on with the disclaimer and get to work, shall we?

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

In terms of structure, our lesson song essentially has two parts – a “verse” section that also serves as the backdrop for the introduction and a “bridge” section. One of my (many) reasons for choosing this particular song as a lesson is that both sections involve a descending walking bass line and, in an interesting juxtaposition, the verses are in A minor while the bridge is in A major.

Like many songs, the descending walking bass line of While My Guitar Gently Weeps provides a solid hook, so it’s no surprise that it shows up right at the start of things. On the original recording, there is a short and simple piano riff that we’ll play on the guitar:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Because there’s not much room between the A note of the piano line and the note of the open A string that we’re using to start our descending bass line, I take the liberty of “thickening” the sound a little by using the E note (second fret of the D string) along with the A note of the piano part. You can do this by using two fingers (usually the index and middle fingers) on those notes while hitting the open A string and following bass notes with your thumb. Another option is to “sweep” the two strings in an upstroke with one finger (usually the index). That’s what I’m doing in the MP3 example, in case you’re wondering.

And because you’re going to be working with this bass line and these chords quite a bit, it doesn’t hurt to take the time early on to experiment with fingering. Many people will find it easy to form a regular Am chord and then use the pinky to get the G note (third fret of the low E (sixth) string) in the bass of the Am/G and then have the thumb take on the F# note at the second fret on the Am/F#.

The other tricky spot is the fourth measure, where I’ve written “F6″ for the chord. If any of you have checked out any tablature or chord charts or “cheat sheets” for this song, it’s very likely you’ve seen this “F” or “Fmaj7″ used, the latter probably being the most common. And if you listen to the original recording, you can certainly hear Fmaj7 being played. But because the note of the piano riff we’re using as our melody is D (third fret of the B string) at this point, and because D, when added to an F chord, creates an F6, it just made more sense to write it out this way.

And, fortunately, there are as many ways to finger this particular chord voicing as there are names to call it. You can go with a full barre at the first fret, as shown on the chord chart in Example 1. If you’re good with your thumb, you can first finger an open position Fmaj7 chord using your index finger on the first fret of the B string, your middle finger on the second fret of the G and your ring finger on the third fret of the D. Then use your pinky to get the D note (third fret of the B string) while using your thumb to get the F in the bass at the first fret of the low E (sixth) string. Playing it this way makes getting the melody notes of this measure very easy – you simply remove your pinky and the index finger is already on the C note for you. All you have to do then is drop the pinky back on.

Some people might find it easier to use the index finger for the F in the bass while fretting the D note (third fret B string) with the pinky, the A note (second fret G string) with the middle finger and the F note (third fret D string) with the ring finger. This will mean abandoning the F in the bass in order to use the index finger to get the C note (first fret of the B string) in the melody. That has to be your call.

Something to remember, too, is that as you get more comfortable with the chord changes and with your fingering, you may find yourself changing what you initially decide to do. This happens all the time with guitarists. Something that seemed too hard at first can suddenly become quite easy to do. So don’t stop trying out different ideas and revisiting old ones.

The last four measures of the Introduction are pretty much straight arpeggios based on open position chord fingerings. The only spot where you’ll have to make an effort is in the next-to-last measure, where you’ll need your pinky to finger the F# note at the fourth fret of the D string.

And, speaking of that measure, I also took the liberty of changing the usual D chord you’ll find on most versions of this song to D/F#, simply to have another continuous descending walking bass line. You should know by now that I’m addicted to those things.

Before we move on to the Verse section, let’s chat a moment about what, exactly, we’re trying to do in this lesson. You may have noticed in our working through the Introduction that there’s a lot of space in this arrangement. When working out a “finger style / chord melody” arrangement, you have a lot of choices when it comes to playing. Obviously, you want the melody to ring out whenever possible. You want the bass line and chords to be noticeable as well, but not to the point of hiding the melody of the song.

So whether or not you’re aware of it, you’re going to have to start to develop a sense of touch in your fingers, getting them to the point where they will stress certain notes, while playing others a little more softly. You can’t have the bass note (almost always played by the thumb) overpower your melody note.

And you will have to make your own decisions when it comes to filling in the spaces that are created by the melody line. You can leave them be, you can add additional notes in the bass, you can add some fancy ornamentation to the melody (making your guitar “sing,” if you will) or you can pick a few notes in the accompanying chord. You can, as you grow as a guitarist, do any combination of these ideas. And that’s not counting coming up with your own personal touches.

For our arrangement of While My Guitar Gently Weeps, I’m leaving things fairly open. You’ll notice that while I give you a specific template in the various examples, I’m also taking a few liberties with the MP3 sound files – adding a note here or there, strumming a full chord in one place even though it’s not detailed in the musical notation / tablature. One of my reasons for choosing this song is because I’m sure many of you are familiar with it. And I think you’ll be able to grasp how these minor variations do not in any way make the song unrecognizable.

Be that as it may, it’s also good to be able to play a melody pretty close to the original version, so in our next example we’ll look at the four measures of the Verse section and try to pay particular attention to the use of anticipation in the phrasing of the melody:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The melody here pretty much hangs around the A (second fret of the G string), B and C notes, and you should find this relatively easy to play as long as you hang on to your Am chord most of the time. Obviously, you’ll need to open up the B string when that note is needed. And if you’ve been practicing the first three chord changes, you’re probably finding playing this a snap so far.

You should probably hear that the shift between the end of the third measure (with the Am/F#) and the fourth one (with the F6) is not all that smooth. This is one reason why you first want to get comfortable with the chord changes, but just as importantly you want to be willing to go with the flow of the song as you’re playing it. You’ll hear me take some liberties with it when we look at the full verse:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, you are probably not finding any of this too hard at this point, and that’s kind of the point. The melody hangs fairly close to the open position chord fingerings and there are no real trouble spots to speak of.

You may have noticed that we’ve got two separate full measures of E (measures eight and sixteen) that we’re filling with a simple E arpeggio. The first E chord serves as a “turnaround” back to the Am chord that starts the next line of the song while the second one turns us around to the A chord at the start of the Bridge section. Simple arpeggios, of course, are simply one of many things we can do. And since we’ve been playing descending walking bass lines throughout the rest of the verse, why not add an ascending one here? Here are a couple of possibilities:

If there’s a trick to this, it’s remembering to use your middle finger for all the notes on the low E (sixth) string, as that gives you your index finger for the G# (first fret of the G string) and also allows your ring finger to play the A, A# and B (second, third and fourth frets of the G string, respectively).

These turnarounds become even more important in the Bridge section because we’ve got two full measure of E going on with no melody to speak of. You’ll find that I’ve come up with a slight variation on the second turnaround in our last example for the Bridge:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

And here’s where things get a little more complicated. It starts simply enough, using an open position A chord to get us going. But then we’ve got to move to a C#m chord, which I’ve changed to “C#m7/G#” for our arrangement. Why? The two main reasons are that we’re beginning with an A chord and F#m is the next chord in the progression so using G# (fourth fret of the low E (sixth) string) gives us yet another nice descending bass line. Making it C#m7 also frees up the pinky, which we can then use to play the F# note (seventh fret of the B string) in the melody line.

The F#m in the third measure is usually a full barre chord, but it’s worth noting that if you change it to F#m7 (242222), you then have a finger free to play the B note (shown as the open B string in the notation) at the fourth fret of the G string instead. Those of you “gifted in thumb” might do something a little more interesting and play only part of the chord, using your thumb, obviously, for the F# in the bass (second fret of the low E (sixth) string), your ring finger for the fourth fret of the A string, your ring finger for the fourth fret of the D string and your index finger for the second fret of the B string. This does leave the G string naked and you’ll have to be careful not to hit it accidentally.

Likewise, you can certainly go back to the full C#m barre chord in the next measure, but I find myself, pardon the pun, partial to the voicing of C#m7 that I’ve put in the notation. One of my reasons for preferring this voicing is that you also get the open B string to fool around with during a long pause in the melody line.

I should also point out here that you can also use the open low E (sixth) string as your bass note to continue the descending bass line. But since Bm is our next chord, I think that switching to C# as our bass note made for a nicer transition.

And speaking of that Bm, going with an open position Bm7 voicing (x20202) puts you right on top of all the notes you need for your melody. You don’t even have to finger the F# note at the second fret of the high E (first) string as it’s not part of the melody line. But the open high E string is, so how about that!

In the second measure of Bm (or Bm7 as we have in the example), you’ll notice one of those “melodic ornamentations” I alluded to earlier. In the original song, the melody line simply steps down from C# (second fret of the B string) to B. But I like making it a little fancier, pulling off from C# to the open B and then hitting the A note at the second fret of the G (where my finger just happens to be anyway) and then going back to the B note of the melody. It’s a little touch, and it sounds nice. You, of course, can choose to ignore it or, better yet, come up with something even more interesting on your own.

As noted in the example, you want to play this section twice to make up the whole bridge. You will hear a number of subtle variations between the two runs through the progression on the MP3 file.

And that’s what this is ultimately all about. Here is an MP3 of me going through the Introduction, then the Verse section, then the Bridge and then finally back to the Verse again.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You can find the tablature here: Download gif (Right-click and “Save as”)

The whole of While My Guitar Gently Weeps consists simply of these parts. You can decide to end your arrangement with a fade-out over the Verse (as in the original) or you can go back and do a repeat of the Introduction and finish with an Am chord, or just about anything you find interesting.

I hope you had fun with this lesson on “finger style / chord melody” arrangements. They certainly sound very impressive and, as you’ve (hopefully) discovered, they don’t have to be all that hard to learn.

And, as always, please feel free to write in with any questions, comments, concerns or songs (and/or riffs and solos) you’d like to see discussed in future pieces. You can either drop off a note at the Guitar Forum page or email me directly at either dhodge@guitarnoise.com or dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

While My Guitar Gently Weeps – A Finger Style / Chord Melody Arrangement was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Just as important, perhaps more so – developing this flexibility will keep you from falling back on the old “must-not-deviate-from-original-strumming-pattern” mentality, which sounds even more ludicrous, by the way, if you can manage to say it with a bit of a James Shatner impression.

Think about this: Most of us pick up the guitar to play songs. If we go out of our way to learn a single part (the strumming guitar) of a song that is done by a whole band, then our playing isn’t going to sound just like the song to begin with. So why get hung up on that when we can usually come up with something a lot more interesting that still sounds like the song we want to play?

Liner Notes: Pink Floyd

David Gilmour’s distinctive guitar style is often regarded as the most familiar aspect of the Pink Floyd sound. It’s instantly recognizable for its economy and tone and his gift of melodic phrasing is still influencing guitarists all over the world.

We have several lessons on the music of David Gilmour and Pink Floyd.

• Wish You Were Here
• Wish You Were Here – Intro Solo
• Brain Damage / Eclipse
• Money (for Bass Guitar)

For more check out our Pink Floyd artist page.

Looking at songs as things you can arrange, pardon the pun, will give you the pluck to try out songs that you might dismiss as “beyond” your capabilities. I can’t even begin to tell you how cool it is when you’re listening to a single guitarist perform and he or she totally stuns you by coming up with a song you’ve never heard done before in a single-guitar arrangement.

So without further ado, let’s get down to the task at hand, shall we?

In case you didn’t read the title, we’re dipping once again into our Pink Floyd catalogue for this lesson and pulling out the classic ballad Comfortably Numb, originally released on their album The Wall. I’m pretty certain most of you are familiar with the tune, so much so in fact that I’m wondering whether or not I should even discuss the song’s structure.

Better safe than sorry, right? Like our last lesson, Play with Fire, Comfortably Numb is made up of two distinct sections – a “verse” section and a “chorus” section. Some people might like to break the chorus down into two subsections: a “pre-chorus” (starting with the line “…there is no pain…”) and a regular “chorus” (just the final line – “…I have become comfortably numb…”). That seems a little like too much work for me, so we’ll settle for two parts, okay? Laying out the song in the style of a “cheat sheet” or “chord sheet,” and going with very basic chords, it would look like this:

You can see that the two sections have their own chord progressions. The verses are made up of either two or three sets of a Bm – A – G – Em – Bm progression while the chorus goes from D to A twice, C to G twice, back to D and A (again twice) and then back to C and G again (and again, twice). The last line goes from A to C to G and ends on D.

The chorus, beginning with the repeated line of D to A, serves as the backing progression for the first instrumental solo. The last line of the chorus is still sung, though, which leads us back to the verse section again.

Finally, the chord progression of the verse serves as the backing chords for the extended solo of the outro. And that pretty much covers the structure of our song.

Comfortably Numb is played at a rather languid pace; I think it’s around sixty-five beats per minute. This leaves a lot of space for strumming and, during the first verse, Gilmour does very little of it. You can also hear that when he gets to the second Bm (at the point where the lyrics are “…anyone home…”) that he’s not really playing a Bm chord, but something a little more moody and mysterious. Back to that in a moment…

During the second pass at the Verse Section, the strumming is actually more like it was in the chorus section, a bit busier but still steady. Almost like someone managing to get to his feet, perhaps?

Example 1 lays out these two basic strumming patterns for you:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As you can see and hear, I’ve used the Bm chord for this example but I could have used any of the other chords as well. Speaking of that Bm chord, and we’ve certainly talked about this before, you can use one of three different voicings for it in this song:

The first one is obviously easiest and those of you who are comfortable with the full barre chord version (the third choice) will probably like the way that sounds. I’m going with the second one for now, because of what we’re going to do next. But before we go on, this would be a good place to point out that you can now play this song. Seriously. You’ve got the basic chords and some simple, yet effective, strumming patterns. What more do you need?

Wants, however, are a totally different matter. And we’re working on a single guitar arrangement of our song, perhaps we want to play Comfortably Numb with a few more interesting touches than simply being locked into a strumming pattern throughout the whole tune.

So what I’m proposing is that we take a number of ideas from our various Guitar Noise Podcasts, things like combining strumming and crosspicking (from GN Podcast #8) or even the sixteenth note accent from way back in GN Podcast #4 and put them into play. We can even use a little bit of our bass line work. In fact, if you’ve read the very first lesson on walking bass lines, Connecting the Dots, you’ll see that we’ll put Examples 8 and 10 from that lesson to good use in this one.

Before we do, though, let’s go back and look at the “mysterious” sounding Bm chord that Gilmour plays at the end of the verse progressions. It’s a Bm chord where the D note (third fret of the B string) has been replaced with C# (second fret of the B string), giving what us what most guitarists would call a Bsus2 chord and it would look like this, if you were using the “second choice” voicing of Bm as a starting point;

Alright, then, I think we’re ready to come up with an interesting “template” for the verse chord progression. After doing a bit of playing around and experimenting, I’ve hit upon this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

That’s certainly a lot more interesting than just strumming around. The first measure starts with a Bm chord, but I’ve left the high E (first) string open so that I can hammer onto the second fret to get the F# note to complete the chord. There’s a bit of sneakiness in that on my part, too. Since that F# note is the note of the start of the melody, I usually find myself trying to find it and often slide up to it from E. So this little hammer-on helps me to find the melody line right from the start. For the third and fourth beats of the measure, I use simple upstroke arpeggios, removing my finger from the high E (first) string again to get a more interesting final arpeggio to contrast with the one of the third beat.

I like the combination of strumming, hammer-ons and arpeggios in the first measure so much that I use it again in the second measure for the A chord. The first beat begins with what some folks call “Asus2,” which is just an A chord with no finger on the B string. I hammer-on the second fret of the B string and also catch the full A chord on the upstroke. And since we’ve been doing okay with the hammer-ons, why not give the pull-offs some equal time? You’ll find one in the last arpeggio that occurs on the fourth beat of this measure.

Since the G to Em transition that occurs in the third measure is dramatic, the easiest thing to do is to emphasize it by keeping the rest of the strumming in this measure relatively sparse. Those of you with sharp ears may hear that I’m sometimes catching a few extra notes on this short descending bass line. This is done by hitting all three of the low strings while playing it:

The thing to watch out for here is that you want to mute the A string when you go for the F# note (second fret of the low E) in the bass. Simply lifting your finger that is already sitting there at the second fret just enough to dampen the A string should do the trick.

Another thing to notice is that we’re what might be a different voicing of the G chord that some of you may not have come across before (although some of you do recognize it, I’m sure, from other lessons here at Guitar Noise). Having the D note (third fret of the B string) allows you to just leave it there when you play your Em. This added D note turns the Em into an Em7, which gives the chord a more interesting feel. You’ll hear on the last MP3 file that I strummed this Em7 chord very close to the bridge of the guitar, giving the strum a little more of a ‘ghostly” effect. Using a technique such as this every now and then can also make a song more interesting to your listeners. Not to mention to yourself!

Because the third measure is practically all strumming, it kind of makes sense to follow that up with a measure that is nothing but single picked notes. In my playing around, I discovered that I liked the arpeggios I could create by leaving the high E (first) string open while playing the Bsus2. This creates another weird chord that I’ve chosen to call “Bsus2sus4″ just to keep the “Dadd2add4″ used in our Easy Songs for Beginners lesson on Man on the Moon company. If you finger the chord using your ring finger on the fourth fret of the D string, your pinky on the fourth fret of the G string and your index finger on second fret of the B, that will free up your index finger to perform the hammer-on and pull-off at the third fret of the B string.

So far, so good? As always, it’s important to note here that this “template” is merely a suggestion. There is no end to the ideas that you can come up with and while you’re playing you may certainly come across more than one or two that sound good. It also goes without saying that there’s no reason to make things more complicated than you have to. If you can only sing while strumming simply, and if you’re the only one singing and playing, then you have to go with what you’re capable of. But do yourself a favor and keep trying out adding little touches here and there. As you gain more confidence in your abilities, you’ll find yourself able to put your practice into your performance.

And this is important to remember when we get to the chorus. If I’m not handling the singing duties when playing, I like to use the guitar to add the wonderful keyboard arpeggios that are part of the hook of the chorus. When singing, though, that makes thing a bit difficult. Sometimes a compromise is in order.

For instance, the notes of the D arpeggio in the first measure of the chorus, along with the tablature you’ll often find both online and in “guitar tablature edition” books of Pink Floyd music are:

This certainly sounds fine. But if you’re more partial to the sound of ringing strings, you might find this interpretation of the same notes more up your alley:

You might recognize this particular voicing of the D chord from many of our other song lessons and articles here at Guitar Noise. For more about figuring out how to come up with a different chord voicing yourself, check out Moving On Up or Multiple Personality Disorders; both articles are certainly worthy of your attention. The easiest way to finger this, by the way, is to use your index finger for the fifth fret of the high E (first) string, your pinky on the seventh fret of the B string and your ring finger on seventh fret of the G string.

And we’ve not mentioned it yet, but if you decide to play Comfortably Numb on a twelve-string guitar (no reason not to!), this particular technique will sound very cool.

Back to the point – borrowing the lines from the keyboard is a great idea, but if you’re not able to handle it and sing, there’s no reason to abandon it all together. After all, during each of the measures of A, you’re only singing on the first beat. Likewise the first two measures of G in the chorus section. So, strumming the D’s and C’s while playing arpeggios on the A’s and G’s should work out fine. In the following example, I’ve written out each of the chord changes as arpeggios, but on the MP3 you’ll hear the example played twice – once with all arpeggios and once with alternating strumming and arpeggios:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The A and G arpeggios vary slightly from the original recording. Actually the A is an exact copy of the second pass on the recording while the G is different in that I’ve changed the notes used in order to take the best advantage of the guitar’s two open high strings. If you’re playing with someone who’s got that part covered, then you obviously don’t have to worry about it. If you’re on your own, might as well make things easier on you. Chances are likely that if I hadn’t told you it was different, you might not have even noticed. You’re still using the flavor of the song and that will often carry you through.

For the second pass through the D, A, D, A, C, G, C, G of the chorus, I want to give the music more of a push, so I go for all strumming (and these are all just slight variations of the “possible chorus” strumming from Example 1) but I punch things up by adding a sixteenth note accent at the last half of the fourth beat of the previous measure, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Again, and you’re undoubtedly tired of hearing this by now, this is also just a suggestion. You can use these sixteenth note accents in combination with arpeggios or with different strumming patterns or not use them at all. This is, after all, your call as arranger. You are the one who knows what you can (or can’t) play at this point in your guitar playing adventure.

You might also hear in the last MP3 example that I manage to find the melody notes of the very last phrase of lyric (“…have become comfortably numb…”) in much the same way we found the melody line of Play with Fire. To accomplish this, I need to change the last C to Cadd9, which means adding the pinky to the third fret of the B string in order to get the D note of the melody. And then, after a bit of careful picking with the G chord, I finished things off with first a partial D chord, using just the A, D and G strings, and then a full D, strummed as close to the bridge of the guitar as possible in order to quiet things down a bit for the second verse.

And that’s pretty much everything. You’re good to go! I hope you’ve had fun with this lesson. The main thing to remember is that Comfortably Numb is a song where your playing carries a lot of emotional weight, so why sit on a robotic strumming pattern that displays none?

And for those who noticed that I totally ignored the solo between the first chorus and the second verse, don’t worry. Time permitting (although that might mean sometime after August), I will write out a single guitar arrangement for that to help you out.

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Comfortably Numb – Pink Floyd was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

And maybe that was the whole problem about using it as a beginners’ lesson. To me it seemed a little redundant. You’ve already learned the picking pattern, so just work out the chord changes and presto! Dust in the wind! Didn’t seem like there’d be much to teach.

I know you get tired of me writing this, but the point of any of the song lessons at Guitar Noise is not to teach you to play that particular song. Well, it is, but not really. What we want to do with our lessons is give you techniques and ideas and arrangements that you can then use with other songs you play. Learning the song is just the very tip of the iceberg, if you’ll pardon the cliché.

So I thought about Dust some more, especially when I got an email from a GN Forum member wondering why, even with the chords and the correct picking pattern, the song still “didn’t sound right.” And I looked at the differences between the original recording and the arrangement I’ve developed over time and I realized that my arrangement simply incorporates a bit more of the melody into the picking pattern. That’s something worth discussion. So here we are.

And because some of what we’re discussing is going to require a bit more thought and practice on your part, I decided to put this lesson in the “Intermediates” section, mostly because of the feedback I’m sure I’m going to get should I risk sticking it into the “Easy Songs for Beginners.” But like most of these “Intermediate” song lessons, it’s more about the work that you’re willing to put into it than about whether or not it’s actually harder. Give it a go and see!

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Same Old Song (Pattern)

As mentioned, the truth of the matter is that if you have gotten the “pinch pattern” used in Example 2 of the Add a Pinch lesson, then you have this song down cold because, with one or two small exceptions, virtually everything else in the song uses this pinch/picking pattern.

In terms of structure, Dust is very simple. There’s an introduction (that you’ve pretty much already learned to play if you’ve gone through the entire Add a Pinch lesson), a verse and a chorus, a second verse and chorus, a brief instrumental interlude, a final verse and chorus and then a short outro that fades out as the song ends.

As mentioned, we covered about ninety-eight point seven six seven percent of the intro in the Add a Pinch tutorial. The only thing missing is the “pickup,” which is a slight change of pattern at the very end of the introduction that carries us into the first verse. We would tack this change onto the very end of “Example 7″ from the Add a Pinch lesson:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

We’ve run into this particular use of chords in numerous lessons here at Guitar Noise, Blackbird being the first one that springs to mind. And speaking of Blackbird, you’ll notice that I took the liberty of adding a slight variation to this part (“Example 1A”) that uses the A and G notes on the G string to create a fuller pattern and it sounds a bit like Blackbird, no? My thought in adding this is that sometimes it’s hard to switch from the original pattern and give up on the sixteenth notes we’ve been using. So if you can’t keep your fingers from moving, why not just add an extra string to the pattern?

There are a lot of ways to finger the G/B – the important thing to remember is that, at the heart of all of this, you are simply making a slight detour in an Am to C chord change. You’re probably making the Am chord in the “normal” open position manner, that is, your index finger is on the first fret of the B string, your ring finger is on the second fret of the G and your middle finger is on the second fret of the D. Keeping this end goal of getting to a C chord in mind, you might find the best way to play the G/B is to shift your middle finger from the second fret of the D string to the second fret of the A and to use your pinky to get the D note at the third fret of the B string. Some people feel more comfortable shifting all the fingers and play the G/B with the index finger on the A string and the ring finger on the B string, but that seems like a lot of unnecessary movement. Plus, we’ll see that this G/B chord is going to pop up again several times, so it might be beneficial to feel comfortable with a couple of different fingerings.

So let’s try out the whole intro before getting into the verse, shall we?

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The verse consists of four measures that are then repeated, with a slight variation between the fourth measure and the eighth measure:

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Now, while this arrangement is pretty much taken directly from the guitar part of the original recording, I have to admit I don’t like it much for a single guitar performance. We go from having the guitar using the “pinch” technique to shadow the melody in the first line, only to lose it when we switch to the third measure. So, with your permission, I’d like to suggest that we try out a little alteration in the chording that will allow us to track the melody all the way through:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The one “little alteration” simply means substituting Dm for Dm7. Granted, that’s not the most challenging of tasks, but it does free you up to play along with the melody line for these two measures of the verse. Use your pinky to pull off from the G note (third fret of the high E (sixth) string) to the F note at the first fret. Your pinky can then cover the D note at the third fret of the B string later in the measure. That is, if you’re like me and use your pinky to make a Dm chord. If not, then you should have even less trouble with it.

I deliberately give the melody a bit of a “hiccup” when returning to the Am chord in the next measure in order to make the finger picking easier. That’s a bit of artistic license on my part. Playing the fourth and eighth measures as outlined in Example 3 and Example 3A will certainly work as well.

All We Are…

Having covered the introduction and the verses, let’s turn our attention to the chorus. As with our verse, we can do it straight or go with a more melodic approach. Let’s look at each:

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Essentially, the chorus consists of a repeated two-measure chord progression of D (first two beats of first measure), G (second two beats of the first measure) and Am (second measure). Each cycle through the progression corresponds to one singing of “…dust in the wind…” To make the chord progression more interesting, Kerry Livgren (who wrote the song) used a walking bass line, starting with F# (second fret of the low E (sixth) string) played on the D chord (actually making it D/F#), which goes to G for the G chord, A for the Am chord and then back to G during the last two beats of Am, which technically makes the chord an Am7 or Am/G or even Am7/G depending on your mood when writing it out. I tend to use Am7/G (302010) simply because it’s easier to finger the G note in the bass with the ring finger rather than the pinky. If you’re okay with the stretch then by all means use the full Am/G (302210) fingering.

This pattern is, as mentioned, repeated, with a (yes, you guessed!) slight variation on the last measure, which also includes the “pick up” back into the verse. We could get truly annoying and call it a “turnaround,” but why make more trouble for ourselves at this point?

Adding touches of the melody to the chorus is easy to start with. The initial melody note is D (third fret of the B string), which we’re pinching in the original on the D chord. To keep this note when we change to G, just use a five-string G chord voicing (32003x), especially since you won’t be hitting the high E (first) string with your picking pattern.

I also drop out all of the background in the last beat of the first measure, focusing solely on the two melody notes of C and B (first fret of B string and open B string respectively). This is primarily a matter of making things simpler, but it also brings a moment of relative emptiness to the picking pattern, which has been going non-stop since the introduction. Sometimes a little touch like this can catch your listeners’ attention.

When we get to the Am chord, the melody note is the A at the second fret of the G string. You really want to nail this one good on the first beat as you’ll be covering it over with the same note an instant later in the picking pattern. Hit is hard first and then lightly the second time. And yes, that takes a little practice.

The second time through the progression, we add more D notes (“…all we are is…”) by either using two fingers to pick the B and G strings or by “sweeping” one finger across the two strings in an upward movement. In the MP3 example you can hear me use the latter technique.

Although I do like adding the melody line (or at least parts of it) to both the verse and chorus, I found that I also liked the B to C hammer-on on the B string in the choruses. So I tried to include that in the last measure of the chorus in this arrangement. Over time, it developed into the little flourish that I tabbed out for you in the last example.

This would probably be a good place to mention that the very last solo (after the third verse and just before the outro) is twice as long. In other words, it cycles through the chord changes four times.

Interlude and Outro

Having dealt with the intro, verse and chorus, we now have the interlude and outro to contend with. Except for one slight hiccup, the interlude is still the same basic picking pattern we’ve used all along. The only thing is that we now have some more interesting chord voices to work with:

You definitely want to take a few moments and simple work through the chord changes before working the picking pattern with them. Chances are likely you’ll use your index and ring fingers for most of the work, but I’d like to suggest using your pinky instead of the ring finger for the two F(#11) chords, mostly because it makes the switch from the first on to the second one easier, as you’ll see in a moment.

First, though, I should mention that this chord pattern for the interlude actually starts on the final measure of the second chorus. When you hit the word “wind” the second time around, you start in with the interlude chords, using the picking pattern you’ll see in a moment. The vocals continue (mostly going “oh oh oh”) the first time through the progression and then it plays two additional times while the strings play the instrumental break.

Now let’s look at that little hiccup I mentioned. You’ll find it at the very end of the first measure:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You see, in Example 6, that there’s a pull off between the seventh and fifth frets of the D string. This actually isn’t that hard to accomplish with a little practice. But here is where a (very) little bit of fretboard knowledge can come in handy. Even if you rely on tablature to do everything for you, you might remember somewhere in the back of your mind that the fifth fret of the D string is G, same as the open G string. That’s one way to tune your guitar. So you can, if you’d like, simply open up the G string as I do in Example 6A to get the very same notes. I also like the sound of the ringing notes of the open strings, so I tend to use this way of playing the interlude on occasion. And, as you’ve hopefully heard in the last MP3 file, both ways sound perfectly fine.

Finally, we get to the outro. As I mentioned earlier, the final chorus is repeated twice and when you get to the very last word (“wind”) you begin the outro pattern that you’ll see in Example 7.

This is the only major deviation from the pinching/picking pattern used throughout the song, so you may want to take this very slowly, piece by piece. Start with using just your thumb on the A and D string to get yourself set and steady in the rhythm and then work on adding the higher strings:

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Again, I can’t stress enough to work through this last part slowly and deliberately. With a little concentrated effort and a little more practice, you should be able to manage this change in pattern. If, however, you find yourself totally at a loss, then use the intro as your outro. Not many people will even notice the difference.

Alright then, here’s the whole package:

I deliberately didn’t include a “playing all the parts” MP3 for this. If you’ve gone through this lesson carefully, you really don’t need it. What’s more important is for you to play it through as best you can. Playing a pattern like this throughout an entire song is not easy, which is why you want to come up with little places of your own to change things up a bit. It also makes things more interesting for your listeners when they get to hear you play it instead of Kansas.

I hope you enjoyed this little outing and find ways to work in melody lines to other songs you already play or are in the process of learning. At the very least, being able to add a bit of melody to your picking can help you provide short leads when you’re performing a solo guitar act and don’t want to sound like you’ve lost your band!

As always, please feel free to post your questions and suggestions on the Guitar Noise Forum’s “Guitar Noise Lessons” page or email me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until our next lesson…

Peace

Dust In The Wind – Kansas was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

As I mentioned, for this lesson we want to focus on the C and Am chords, both of which we know to be “Root 5″ chords. This means the root note for these two chords (C for C and A for Am) can be found on the fifth (A) string. Let’s use our “contrary motion” pattern from the first Travis Picking tutorial and, again just to simplify things for this lesson; we’ll concentrate on our middle four strings, totally ignoring both the high (first) and low (sixth) E strings, like this:

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In case you’ve forgotten, here’s a guide to the picking fingering symbols:

• “T” will be your thumb
• “i” will be your index finger.
• “m” will be your middle finger.
• “a” will be your ring finger.

You’ll also notice that I’m still counting out the example (and I’m encouraging you to do so as well), because knowing where the beat is supposed to fall is going to be very important in a minute!

Okay, take a few moments and get that into your head. Because now it’s time to get it out of your head! Seriously, one of the things I mentioned last time out was that finger picking is actually not all that hard to get into. Once your fingers have a pattern, it usually takes a small amount of time and practice for them to get so into it that you pick up speed quite easily.

This ease with which one takes to finger style is both a blessing and a bane. It’s good, obviously because we can, again with a bit of time and practice, get to the point where we can play a whole song, chord changes and all, just by using a single pattern, as we did in the first Travis tutorial with Dylan’s Blowin’ in the Wind.

But it’s also bad because we get so set in a pattern that we can automatically default to it without thinking. And if we want to switch to a different pattern, or even simply to learn a new picking pattern, we often have to start from scratch.

And today we do want to try a new pattern. Or rather, a variation on the “contrary motion” pattern that we’ve already learned. Instead of alternating thumb and finger throughout the measure, we want to pick with both the thumb and finger on the first beat only and then finish the measure out normally, like this:

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Again, you’ll hear me counting in the MP3 here. The reason is that we’ve got absolutely nothing going on in the second half of the first beat because we’ve shifted the first use of the fingers to the initial beat, when we pluck or “pinch” the strings with both thumb (picking the A string) and middle finger (playing the B string). If you’ve practiced using your thumb to keep a steady beat, counting the “one, two, three, four” of any given measure, this shouldn’t be all that big of a step for you. But before we move on, take some time and get this new pattern into your fingers.

This “pinch” pattern is used in countless songs. I often refer to it, jokingly of course, as “generic folk pattern #2.” It’s amazing how easy it is to fall into once you’ve got it down. And it’s also very important because the pinch allows you to add a melody line to your playing. Elizabeth Cotton’s classic song, Freight Train, pretty much uses this pattern throughout, and which notes you fret and subsequently pinch) on the high strings sing out the song’s melody. Perhaps we’ll make a lesson of that at some point.

But for right now, we want to concentrate on getting the pattern down to the point where we can play it and have a conversation while playing. Once we’re there, then we’ll start to do a bit of very simple ornamentation, which will lead us to the introduction of Dust in the Wind.

A brief side trip, though – I made this past point in Guitar Noise Podcast #7 (which should have gone up online by now! Check it out at the Guitar Noise Blog and it bears repeating. If you can get yourself to the point where you can play a pattern – strumming or fingerstyle or a combination of both – and hold a conversation, then you are more than ninety percent of the way there. Just as you saw with Blowin’ in the Wind, making chord changes while playing a fingerstyle song is a lot easier when you’re comfortable with the pattern (or patterns) you’re playing. It may take a little effort to coordinate both hands, but nowhere near as much effort if you decided to not learn the pattern first.

Alright then, now we want to speed things up a bit. Not really, although it’s going to seem like it when you see the music notation. Basically, we want to play two sets of our new “pinch” pattern in one single measure, which means that instead of using quarter notes and eighth notes, we’ll be playing eighth notes and sixteenth notes, like this:

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Don’t let all the sixteenth notes get to you! All we’re doing is taking the pattern that you’ve already got in your fingers and using your thumb to measure out eighth notes instead of quarter notes. That’s all. So now your thumb is playing “one and two and three and four and…” instead of just “one, two, three, four.” Don’t be fooled into thinking it’s more than that.

Now let’s spice things up a bit – first by playing a Cmaj7 chord instead of C and then trying out a Cadd9 chord. To play Cmaj7, as you know, all you have to do is finger a C chord and then remove your index finger, leaving the B string open. For Cadd9, add your pinky to the third fret of the B string, which adds a D note to the C chord. Here’s what they are like:

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Again, take each chord separately to start with and practice it until you feel you can play it without thinking. Then, when you’re ready, we’ll put the three chords together in sequence, like this:

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Now, that sound familiar, doesn’t it?

Because of all the work you’ve done up ’til this point, you should find that you’re making these chord changes smoothly and cleanly. Give yourself a pat on the back and then we’ll try the same thing with some Am based chords:

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You know the drill by now, right? Once you’re comfortable with these new chords (and you want to be sure you know their names and fingerings!), we’ve got one more task, and that’s to put them into the correct sequence for our introduction to Dust in the Wind:

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The sticky point here for many is going to be the start of the third line. Switching between the Asus2 at the end of the second line and the Cadd9 that starts the third will take a bit of practice (preferably at a relatively slow tempo!) until you get to the point where you don’t worry about it.

But hang in there! If you’ve followed any of the song lessons at Guitar Noise, you’ll know that this “pinch” method occurs quite frequently. You’ll find simpler variations on it in Bookends and Blackbird as well as more complicated uses in Julia, just to name a few. For now, though, get yourself together with this introduction and you’ll be more than halfway home when our complete lesson on Dust in the Wind gets online later this summer.

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

Add A Pinch – Basic Travis Finger Picking Tutorial – Part 2 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

But sometimes it’s also a matter of preference. I can remember ordering the sheet music for today’s lesson, Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle, from the music store by my high school shortly after Thanksgiving in 1974. Having just taken up the guitar less than five months before, I was a little dismayed to (a) see that it was in the key of F and (b) had a lot of chords I wasn’t ready to deal with quite yet, such as Ab and Eb.

I was also taking music theory that year in high school, so it wasn’t all that long before I had transposed this song into the key of E, using a capo on the first fret so I could play along with it whenever I put on the album. My arrangement was awkward, but I was pretty happy with the fact that I’d managed to come up with one.

Flash forward a few years and I found myself sitting second row at a Harry Chapin solo performance and watch while he played his “big hit.” I made note of the fact that he placed his capo higher up on the neck and, the next morning, tried working out a new arrangement with the capo on the eighth fret and playing in the key of A. This definitely sounded better.

But it still wasn’t right to my ears. And the more I listened to the recording (and to Chapin’s live recording of the song as well, since he’d recently released a live album) the more I realized I didn’t like what I was hearing in either of his versions either.

Flash forward a few more years to a day when, just by chance, I missed a few strings when strumming the A chord (now technically an F, since I was capoed up on eight) and got an A5 chord instead. And I finally got what my ears wanted to hear. In this case, changing the key from sounding like a major key was all that it took for me to say, “Now this sounds right.”

Suffice it to say, this arrangement may not be to everyone’s liking, but I think it definitely works and it certainly sounds close enough to the original than no one should give you any grief. And if you want it to sound more like what you think the original recording sounded like, just replace any A5 chords you see with regular old A and you should be fine.

Anyway, thanks for letting me go on like that. Now let’s get going on playing this song.

Structurally speaking, Cat’s in the Cradle consists of an introduction (which is also played before each of the first three verses and additionally serves as the outro for the song), four verses (the third one slightly shorter than the first two and the last one slightly longer from the first three), a chorus that is played after each verse (with some minor lyric changes), and a short instrumental bridge that is played between the third and final verse instead of the “introduction.” How about we tackle each section one at a time?

The Introduction

A couple of more quick notes: as you might guess from the notation and tablature examples, this song (or at least this arrangement of it) is more suited for finger style guitar. But it’s not particularly hard, despite how you may initially feel upon looking at it! Virtually all the finger patterns are either based on basic open chord shapes, based on basic Travis style picking (for more on this topic, check out the latest guitar column Let Your Fingers Do the Talking), or are simple arpeggios (also, sneakily enough, based on chord shapes). You might be tempted to go with just using a pick, as there are a number of places where we’ll be strumming, but there will also be many sections (starting with the Introduction) where you’ll find yourself performing “pinches” – using the thumb on the bass note while simultaneously picking a treble note with your finger.

The other thing I’d like to mention is capo placement. I’m using a capo on the eighth fret for the MP3 examples in order to be in the same key as the original recording. But I know that not everyone is comfortable using their fingers up that high, especially on an acoustic or a classical guitar. Also, some guitars are difficult to play when one is at that end of the fingerboard. So feel free to move down to the seventh, sixth or fifth fret if that’s more comfortable for you. Just remember that you’re not going to sound the same as in the MP3 files.

Alright then, onward! Let’s start with the first two measures of the Introduction:

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This, by the bye, is almost note-for-note perfect from the original recording. And it’s also the reason why I think my ears got so determined to hear this as a song without a distinct major or minor tonality. It sounds a bit like a snippet of Celtic music. The melody of the Introduction deliberately avoids any use of the third, whether major (which, for our A chord, capo or no, would be the note at the second fret of the B string) or minor (first fret of the B string).

While there are all sorts of ways to finger this A5 chord, I’d like to suggest going with your index finger on the D string and your middle finger on the G string. This frees up your ring finger for performing the pull-off on the second fret of the high E (first) string at the start of the second measure. You can them choose between using either your ring finger or your pinky to get the D note (third fret of the D string) later that measure.

As with all our Guitar Noise song arrangements, this one is meant to simply be a starting place for your own ideas. So you might, for instance, want to pair the E note located at the second fret of the D string to go along with the fist play of the open high E (first) string. That will definitely add a little bit of body to the melody of the Introduction.

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Using the fingering I mentioned will also make the transition from Measure Two to Measure Three quite easy. Again, your ring finger is free to get the C note at the third fret of the A string. This measure is a textbook use of Travis finger picking style.

But don’t get too settled into a groove because there’s a change of time signature in the very next measure. Here in Measure Four, you can either take your fingers in the A5 shape and simply move them to the next lower strings, or you can make a little jump and fret your Em the way most people tend to do, with their middle finger on the A string and the ring finger on the D string.

This brief side trip into 2 /4 timing lasts only a single measure. Measure Five finds us back in 4 /4 timing, and we’ll be here until we again come across the Introduction section when it is played between the first chorus and the second verse. Here we give ourselves a few resounding strums of the A5 chord.

Most transcriptions of this song are content to finish the Introduction with several measures of the A chord (A major, that is) being played until the verse starts up. I’ve opted to add a little “turnaround” (even though, technically, it’s not so much a “turnaround” as a “riff to play while we’re waiting for the beginning of the verse and we’re stuck on the same chord for a while”) that is patterned after the cello part in the original recording. Here we use an Am chord to give us our shape to play the riff. First we get the Am chord set up and then we pinch the open A string while picking the B string (where our index finger is on the first fret) at the same time. After the pinch, pull-off your index finger in order to sound the open B string and then pick the G and D strings to complete the arpeggio.

Having an Am chord may seem a little strange, especially after making such a big deal about the tonality of this song, but I prefer to think of it as foreshadowing for the C chord that’s coming up as a short, condensed reprise of the chords from Measures Three and Four. Indeed, many versions of Cat’s in the Cradle use the open A string for the bass note in those two measures. But if you listen to the original recording, you can hear the bassist playing the C and B notes that we’re playing on the A string. And even though we’re playing without a bass player, that doesn’t mean we should sound like we don’t care about the bass.

The strumming I chose here at the end of the Introduction is, needless to say, one of one hundred thousand and twenty-eight possible patterns. No, not literally! Well, maybe…

The point is that there are all sorts of ways to strum this, as there will be later on in the chorus. In the final MP3 (which I’ve not even recorded as I write this part of the lesson) you’ll probably hear numerous variations on the basic strumming patterns I write out. Why? Because I’m not worried about “the” strumming pattern. What I am worried about is not sounding stiff and lifeless. So patterns will definitely vary somewhat throughout a song. That’s what strumming is supposed to be about. And, if you’ve read any of my previous lessons, you know that this is the “obligatory tell the world that you should worry more about keeping a steady rhythm than about copying one particular strumming pattern” speech that I have to have (at least) one of in each lesson.

The Verses

Since the melody of the verses is derived from the Introduction, it only makes sense to use that melody as a guide for putting together a rhythm/picking pattern for this section of the song. So here a pattern that will work with the first four measures of the verse, which will then be repeated in the next four measures:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You should be able to hear (as well as to see from the notation / tablature) that the first three measures are the same pattern. We obviously changed some of the notes when we changed chords from A5 to C. And we also obviously changed the string of the bass note when we got to the D chord.

In the fourth measure, I change the string of the initial pinch, using the open high E (first) string in order to shadow the melody of this part of the verse. I also drop an eighth note at the end of the pattern in order to give this verse section a little more of a natural breathing space.

As mentioned, we play this “first section” of the verse twice through. Then we move to the “second section, which is just a simple walking bass line / arpeggio combination that you’ve seen in lessons like Friend of the Devil or may have heard in the Guitar Noise Podcast #6 over at the Guitar Noise Blog. In fact, except for this song not being in 3 / 4 timing, the first four measures of the second section of Cat’s in the Cradle is a lot like the first half of that podcast:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The idea here is fairly straightforward. Pick the bass note with your thumb and then play an arpeggio on the D, G and B strings. We’ll make an exception for the last half of the second measure (where we’re playing the Em/D chord – probably the guitarist’s all time favorite chord of all, by the way!) where the bass note is the open D string, so we alter the pattern slightly.

Sometimes, in the heat of playing the song, I may find myself substituting the fifth measure of this section for the third. Does it make that much of a difference? Not in the least!

This is also a good place to make the following important notes concerning the third and fourth verses of our song:

In the third verse, the last line of lyric is dropped, which means that we need to go from Measure Three of this section directly to the last two measures. You can, if you’d rather, go straight from the second measure to the fifth.

In the last verse, the entire second section of the verse is played twice in a row. The second time starts with the line “…and as I hung up the phone…” To add a little variation at this point, you might want to try going with less accompaniment during the repeat, switching from eighth note arpeggios to deliberately pinched half notes, like this:

You could also start your half notes earlier, perhaps in the third to last measure, as you’ll hear in the final MP3 later on.

The Chorus and The Bridge

The majority of the chorus is strummed, with the chord progression going from A5 to G to C and to D, and then repeating the A5 to G measures before finishing up just like the second section of the verse:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As mentioned earlier, there’s no end to the ways you could strum this. The main thing is to try to keep to the lower strings. This is the section where many people want to play A major instead of A5. Please feel free to do so. To my ears, as I mentioned at the start of the lesson, the A major chord simply doesn’t sit well and I find I even prefer Aadd9 (x02200) to A major. In the MP3, you’ll hear I try to stick to strumming on the lowest strings to keep things simple.

In the fourth measure, where you play the D chord, and for who knows whatever reason, I got into the habit of throwing that single C note, giving it a bit of a edge by bending it around ever so slightly. A little rock ‘n’ roll throwback, perhaps. You’re more than welcome to totally ignore this note and simply keep to the D chord. Or, better still, make up your own little fill to play there.

After the third verse, there is a short instrumental bridge that gets played instead of the Introduction. It’s just four chords played in an over-the-top-can-you-tell-the-song’s-coming-to-the-big-hush-before-the-final-chorus manner. When I saw Chapin in concert, he played this part gleefully, laughingly telling the audience he stole it from the movie, Exodus:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You can get away with playing Fmaj7 instead of F here. In fact, using the high E (first) string as a drone (which means playing G6 – 320000 – instead of G) sounds very nice.

Alright, then, here’s our final product:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

As always, I hope that you’ve had fun with this lesson and that you’ve picked up some ideas about arrangement that you can use in other songs in your ever-growing repertoire.

Remember the whole point of all these lessons is to discover techniques and tips that will help you with all of your playing. The songs are kind of like candy-coating to make learning taste a little less like learning and more like fun.

So, until our next lesson…

Peace

Cat’s In The Cradle – Harry Chapin was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

And when the inevitable question, “should I use my fingers or use a pick?” comes along, again, the answer should be “yes.” Think of it this way: each new technique or idea you have when learning the guitar is like getting a new crayon. Yes, you can certainly create marvelous art with five or six crayons but, being lazy myself, I’d rather have a box of one hundred and eighty-eight crayons to choose from.

Moreover (and pardon the pun), finger style guitar is not all that hard to pick up. In fact, it’s quite easy for most people to get started. And what I’d like to do with this lesson is to get you started. We’ll also toss in an easy song to help you practice your newfound finger picking skills.

These files are the author’s own work and represent his interpretation of this song. They are intended solely for private study, scholarship or research.

Remember that we’ve done some work on finger picking before. The Guitar Noise Easy Songs for Beginners Lesson on The House of the Rising Sun is an excellent place to start if you’ve not made any previous attempts to play finger style. Those patterns are simple arpeggios and will help you to just get used to the idea of tossing your fingers about on the guitar strings.

In this lesson, we’re going to tackle a style of finger picking called Travis picking. This is named after Merle Travis, one of country music’s enduring legends, whose guitar work gained him fame before he was twenty. Nowadays, people say “Travis picking” in much the same way we use words like “Xerox” to mean all photocopying, or “Coke” to mean all soft drinks. But the specific characteristics of Travis picking is the steady, almost metronome-like use of the thumb to play bass notes while the other fingers dance over the higher strings.

And it’s this use of the thumb that offers most beginning guitarists something besides a fancy way of playing. Travis picking is an excellent way to help one develop a steady sense of rhythm.

So let’s get started! The first thing we want to do is to get comfortable with keeping the beat with our thumb. How about we start with a simple D major chord, open position? Get your full D chord in place even though we’re only going to be playing two strings of it. Using your thumb and keeping a steady beat, pick the open D string on the first beat, the G string (with your finger on the second fret) on the second beat, the D string again on the third beat and (you guessed it!) the G string again on the fourth beat. Should sound (and look) like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

For the sake of this lesson, let’s get on the same page as far as finger labeling. And I mean the fingers of your picking hand, not the one on the neck!

“T” will be your thumb.

“i” will be your index finger.

“m” will be your middle finger.

“a” will be your ring finger.

As I mentioned in the House of the Rising Sun lesson, if I was trying to teach you correct form and function, you’d use your thumb to play notes on the three lowest strings (low E, A and D), your ring finger on the first (high E) string, your middle finger on the B string and your index finger on the G string. But, as you can see in our very first example, we’re not going to go strictly with those guidelines. The goal here is to use the thumb to keep the beat and if that means it’s playing a “forbidden string” for our lesson, so be it.

Okay, back to our thumb. See if you can work Example 1 without looking at your hands. Either hand. A good benchmark to set for yourself with almost anything on the guitar is to try to play a technique without looking at your hands. Then while singing or holding a conversation. If you can get to that point with these simple finger picking exercises in this lesson, then you’re well on your way to becoming fairly proficient at basic finger style guitar.

Once you’re good with Example 1, then it’s time to add the fingers. Let’s first try a “parallel motion” pattern, like this:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

You can see and hear how the notes played by the fingers are coming in on the off-beats, right in between the notes played by the thumb, which are on the beat. The fingers are also moving in the same direction as the thumb, namely one string closer to the floor.

The first time you try this, you want to work slowly. It also helps immensely to count out loud (as I’m doing in the MP3) in order to keep your thumb going with the correct timing. You probably won’t have to do that for long. And you’ll also be surprised that your fingers will get faster and faster before you know it.

While I’m suggesting in Example 2 that you use your middle finger for the high E (first) string and your index for the B. But you could also go the classical route and use your ring finger on the E and middle finger on the B. Or you could go the easy way and use your index finger for both strings,,,

Also, don’t be too concerned about a name for this particular pattern, or any pattern for that matter. We’re calling it “parallel motion;” some teachers call it “inside out,” some call it “Fred” (don’t ask!). Rather, think about this: One of the fascinating things about finger style guitar is how quickly most people’s fingers take to a pattern. But that’s also one of the biggest traps of finger picking. Once your fingers latch on to a pattern, it’s hard to break out of it and you can find yourself sounding a bit robotic.

So let’s change our pattern, shall we? How about reversing how we play the fingers?

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

Many of you will find this “contrary motion” (or “outside in,” if you prefer) pattern a little easier. It’s used in many, many songs and, again with some practice, you should find that your hands take to it pretty well.

Again, take your time and try to get to the point where you can perform these patterns without looking at either of your hands. When you get to that point, then you’ll be able to find part of the true beauty of finger style. Listen to what happens when you simply lift your ring finger off the high E (first) string while playing either pattern:

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Pretty good for someone who’s just started finger picking, huh? This is why I’m harping on getting to the point where you don’t have to think about it. When you can trust your picking hand to do its job, then you can get fancy with the chord changes and even staying on a single chord offers more musical possibilities than you might imagine.

Alright, back to the task at hand. D, as you already know, is a “root four” chord, meaning that its root note (D) is played on the fourth string. So let’s branch out a bit and add two more chords to our finger picking. Rather, let’s add two new root positions:

Download mp3 (Right-click and “Save as”)

The patterns for the A chord, since A is a “root five” chord, will also work for Am and C, not to mention A7 and C7 or other variations of these chords that you know in open position. Likewise the patterns for G will serve you perfectly fine if you’re playing any other “root six” position chord, such as E or Em.

The other thing to note here is that you also have other options when it comes to which strings you decide to play. I chose these patterns for the A and G chords because I like the sound. For instance, some people might like to play the open G string as the second “thumb” string instead of the open D, as shown in the previous example. And if you play your G with the D note (third fret of the B string) covered, then you’re going to have yet another different sound.

Some people like to stick with the inner strings when playing root five chords, so on the A chord you’d be striking the open A string with the thumb, then (if using parallel motion) the G string with the index finger, then the D (thumb again) and then the B (middle finger). If you want a more ambiguous sound, eliminating the B string when playing the A chord means that you’re just playing A and E notes, which make up the A5 or A “power chord.” And you can also play a pattern for the A chord where you occasionally lift your finger off the B string (temporarily creating an Aadd9 chord), much as we did with the D chord in Example 4.

Telling you all this is not meant to overwhelm you with decisions. Rather, it’s to give you reasons to explore what you can do with even the simplest of patterns such as this. While you’re practicing these particular chords (and others we’ve mentioned), don’t be afraid to experiment and to listen to all the possibilities that you can come up with. Try to get the sounds into your head and be sure to write down all the ideas you especially like.

And because I think it’s a lot more fun to play songs than to simply practice patterns, why don’t we use this easy version of the Bob Dylan classic, Blowin’ In The Wind as a way to work on our picking and chord changing. There are who knows how many versions of this song, so don’t worry about sounding like the “definitive” one. Just have fun practicing your new Travis picking skills! (Oh, a lot of people play this in Eb for some reason. So just slip a capo on the first fret and you’ll be fine!)

Use any of the patterns you’d like for the D, G and A chords that we’ve been working on today in the appropriate places. I marked a chord for each four beats to help you out:

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As you can hear in this example, you don’t really want to just hang on to the same pattern over and over. It feels a lot more organic and real when you sometimes “slip up” or change from one pattern to another. And don’t forget about using the ideas in Example 4 when sitting on the D chord for more than one measure.

I hope this brief introduction to Travis picking has been enjoyable for you. Even more important, I hope that you’ve found that finger picking isn’t truly all that hard. We’re going to do a number of articles in the near future that will build on what you’ve learned here, so if you’re enjoying working on this, please take the time to get your confidence in your picking abilities built up. It’s not all that far a step to go from this lesson to some of our Intermediate lessons, such as Scarborough Fair, Fields of Gold, or Time After Time.

As always, please feel free to write me with any questions. Either leave me a message at the forum page (you can “Instant Message” me if you’re a member) or mail me directly at dhodgeguitar@aol.com.

Until next time…

Peace

Let Your Fingers Do the Talking – Basic Travis Finger Picking Tutorial – Part 1 was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

Concept : Arpeggiations Mixed With Single Line Phrases

If you play Example 1, you will notice we now play 3 voices :

1) Melody (single note lines),

2) Accompaniment (chord arpeggiation), and

3) Bass (the root on the first beat of each measure to provide a solid reference point)

Before combining these 3 functions it’s wise to experiment with different melodies accompanied by the bass note of each chord

Here we play the melody of Hendrix‘ Little Wing‘s first two measures on different postions on the neck around the chord shapes with the bass notes on strings (6) and (5).. (Notice that I mix open and fretted strings).

It’s important to learn the melody of a tune in different positions because it can be used as a reference, a starting point to improvise and it will give you your solos a richer melodic quality.

Experiment by mixing open and fretted strings.

It’s also possible to play the melody an octave higher (Example 3A) or lower (Example 3 B).

Here we experiment with embellishments of the melody and scalar like passages. Keep in mind it’s our purpose to improvise around the melody. You can leave out or add notes.

Try to create differences into your playing activity. You don’t have to play a mass of notes all the time, incorporate fields of lesser activity.

Now we combine the three voices together on the first four measures of Little Wing. This is quite tricky at first, but the more you experiment the easier you will be able to invent great melodies at the spot in conjunction with an accompaniment and bass part.

Next time we will pay attention to the accompaniment part and put more movement into the bass part.

Also check out… Improvisation for the Fingerstyle Guitarist Part I

Improvisation for the Fingerstyle Guitarist II was written by Gilbert Isbin for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

During this series of columns on improvisation I will always start with a short practical example, analyse it and then give some examples of what we can do with this idea.

So let’s start with this one:

Concept : Arpeggiation with rhythmic diversity

Here the Right Hand fingers hold the chord form (the Em7) while the Left Hand fingers play a picking pattern. For now, since this is meant to be a simple exercise, the bass note (the open low E) is played on the first beat of each measure to have a marking point. As we get more skill and confidence we will add more bass movement.

The fingers of the Left Hand are, in essence, fooling around in the chord form, which leads to more independence and certainty (well, after some experimenting…) The finger indications (p (thumb),i (index), m (middle) and a (ring)) are only suggestions. You should feel free to execute them differently.

Advantage :

You are always sure the notes will fit into the harmony of the piece as the improvised melody is derived totally from the chord notes.

Some Chord Theory :

But after a while, only playing over Em7 chords would become quite boring. That’s why we will use Chord Extensions, notes past the 7th degree, namely the 9th, 11th or 13th, which could also be thought as 2nd, 4th and 6th. Adding these extensions, which are built by stacking triads on top of the original Em triad (see David Hodge’s column, The Power Of Three), is a standard practice of jazz musicians and is quite essential to developing the skills to improvise.

Em7 consists of 1,b3,5,b7 –) E, G, B , D

Chord extensions of Em7 might be :
Em9 : 1, b3,5,b7,9 or E,G,B,D,F#
Em11: 1,b3,5,b7,9,11 or E,G,B,D,F#, A
Em13 1,b3,5,b7,9,11,13 or E,G,B,D,F#,A C#
Em7/11 1,b3,5,b7,11 or E,G,B,D,A
Em (9/11) 1,b3,5,9,11 or E,G,B,F#,A

It would be impossible to execute all the notes from an Em13 chord on the guitar, since it only has six strings and the chord has seven notes. As the 1, 3 and 7 are essential notes to determine the chord family, you might omit the 5, 6 or 9 position.

Now, let’s experiment on a two -chord progression, the chords being Em7 and Cmaj7.

Chord extensions of Cmaj7 might be

Cmaj9 C E G B D
C add 9 C E G D
C 6/9 C E G A D
Cmaj7/6 C E G A B
Cmaj13 C E G B D A

Both chords and some of their extended forms are played all over the neck, but are still played off of the chord shapes. I specifically picked these chord shapes for this exercise because of their simplicity as well as their fresh, lush sound. Open and fretted notes are mixed which can lead to some beautiful colourful results.

So, let’s try this, shall we?

Pay close attention to the rhythms. Use a metronome or tap your foot on each beat of the measure (on the quarter notes). This exercise should be executed at a medium tempo, but you should always start out slowly in order to get the timing correct. Once you feel you have this, then gradually increase your speed.

Measures 1 and 2 start with the basic (first position) forms of Em7 and Cmaj7. In measures 3 and 4, we use our first chord extensions, Em9 and Cmaj9. You should notice that this voicing of the Em9 omits the B note (the fifth). The Cmaj9, in this voicing, is a great example of why 9′s are often thought of as 2′s, because the open D string is scrunched right in with the C and E to either side of it. That why it’s a good idea on this phrase to give a little breathing room between the initial appearance of the C and E, which start measure 4, and the D, which appears three notes later.

The Em7sus in measure 5 is a very interesting chord in that it is built on intervals of fourths: E, A, D and G. That’s just like your standard-tuned guitar! Harmony in fourths (or quartal harmony) has been very important in the development of modern jazz in the 1960′s – listen to McCoy Tyner, Miles Davis and Chick Corea. It also played a very important role in the music of such eclectic songwriters as Nick Drake and Joni Mitchell. Quartal harmony is a refreshing alternative to “tertial” chords (chords based on thirds) – an escape from both major and minor harmonies and the implied progressions that inevitable accompany them.

In measures 7 and 8 be certain to pay attention to the big intervals created by mixing open and fretted strings. Listen to difference in tone color in comparison to the chord voicings you used in the first two measures.

The Cmaj9 chord in the last measure requires a bit of a stretch! By playing the E note (12th fret on the first string) with your pinky when you play the Em9 in the proceeding measure, all you have to do is slide it down to frets for the D note in the Cmaj9. That should make it simpler for you to execute this rather tricky chord.

I hope you have lots of fun with these exercises in fingerstyle. Next time we will take this idea a step further and improvise over a part of Jimi Hendrix’s Little Wing.

Cheers

Also check out… Improvisation for the Fingerstlye Guitarist II

Improvisation for the Fingerstyle Guitarist was written by Gilbert Isbin for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise

A couple of the more recent letters touched on this week’s subject … picking (and finger picking). As you’re all painfully aware of by now, my first guitar was a twelve-string (Ibanez, if you have to know all the details). What you may or may not have picked up on while reading these columns (no pun intended), is that I play left-handed. Being left-handed, it seemed a fairly natural thing to do (and yes, it was a right-hand guitar that I had to restring).

ASIDE: It wasn’t until years later that I realized this might not have been a smart thing to do. Since my left hand is more “athletic,” for want of a better word (“coordinated” or “trainable” also jump to mind), than my right, it might have been to my advantage to have my left hand on the neck instead of simply strumming the strings. I have since learned that a number of guitarists, most notably Paul Simon and Mark Knopfler, are left-handed people who play right handed. But of course, if it were this simple then all right-handed people would be playing left-handed guitars.

Anyway, the main reason that I wanted to have a twelve-string guitar was so that I could have that wonderful deep and melodic tone when I picked the strings. And I did pick the strings myself. For whatever reason, I really didn’t take to a guitar pick right off. I even tried thumb and finger picks for a while (and boy, try fitting a right-handed thumb pick on your left thumb if you’re ever in the mood for a bit of discomfort…), but I would inevitably return to using my bare hand.

I didn’t have a clue as to how to go about finger picking but I came up with some ideas and, within a few months, something that could pass as a “style.” And, yes, you can be pretentious enough to call it a “style” when you’re seventeen and the biggest part of your “style” involves avidly ignoring the fact that God gave you more digits than just your thumb and index finger. Seriously. I developed into a good (notice I don’t say “great”) finger picker only using two fingers.

The really funny thing about this is that a few years ago I met up with someone I used to play with in college. In the course of catching up I mentioned that I’d been teaching myself classical guitar and that it was great because I had to use all my fingers for a change. He thought about this for a while and then said, “That may be all well and good, but I hope you don’t screw up what you’ve got. I always used to think that you were great with just the two.”

It’s an age-old argument. Use a pick or use your fingers? Two columns ago we discussed the importance of strumming; it’s only natural that we should tackle this topic as well. I really feel that because so much emphasis on teaching the guitar these days (and let’s be fair, those days too) is on the neck end of the instrument, that a lot of the subtleties of playing the guitar are lost. Both hands are equally important and if you truly want to be a good/better/best guitarist, then don’t ignore practicing and developing techniques for your strumming hand.

And of course, I’m going to raise the bar and tell you that it’s important to be able to play both ways … with and without a pick. This week we’ll go over the basics of both methods, cover a “trick” or two and set up some guidelines to help you remember to work on your “other” hand.

Kick Starting Your Fingers

Like just about everything else concerning the guitar, there are at least eight million “methods” of finger picking. Which one is right for you? I haven’t the slightest idea, but I’m willing to bet it’s the eight million and first. Why is this? Well, think about any sport that you know something about. Say golf or baseball. Why does each player swing the club or bat in a different way? After all, if there were one correct way, wouldn’t everybody be doing it and therefore making the talent level pretty even? But people are different. What may work for one person could be disastrous for another. Even though there are fairly universal guidelines (keep your eye on the ball, maintain an even stance, balancing your weight between both legs, etc), the individual player has to refine those guidelines so that he or she is able to get his or her best possible performance.

It’s the same thing with the guitar. Some people have naturally longer hands, thinner fingers, quicker wrists, whatever. It occurs to me that a person’s “style” is simply the way a person is able to showcase what talents she or he may have while minimizing her or his shortcomings. And everybody has strong points as well as shortcomings, trust me.

Now, although I refuse to espouse the “Hodge” method of finger picking, I can give you some tips on getting started on developing your own. And guess what? Yes, it involves starting out simply and working your way to handling harder things through practice. Surprise!

To start finger picking, it’s best to simply choose a chord and work out a pattern. This is not as easy as it sounds (no pun intended). Why? Well, different chords use a different number of strings. On some chords you will strum all six strings, but on others only five or even four. So I suggest taking one chord of each. Let’s try G, C and D.

Here’s a rule of thumb (okay, pun intended this time): I tend to use my thumb on the three lower (bass, if you prefer) strings (the 4th, 5th and 6th). I will then use my fingers in whatever manner feels most comfortable on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd strings. If you’re just trying this for the first time (and even if you’re not) I would highly recommend trying to do the following:

If it’s way too awkward or uncomfortable, just use your index finger in place of the ring and middle finger or a combination of the index and middle finger to replace the ring finger. The important thing is to try to get them all involved if possible. And believe me, it’s a lot easier to start out right than to try to rework your thinking at a later date.

I almost always start with either the lowest string (of the chord) or a “pluck,” which is using my thumb and another finger (again, for me, usually the index) at the same time. To get acclimated, try an incredibly easy pattern: play a G major chord, down with the thumb on the 6th, 5th and 4th strings and then up with the fingers on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd.

If you’re not used to this, it is surprising how difficult it seems at first. Once you get the hang of it, though, it can become second nature. When you feel comfortable with this exercise, move on to alternating between your thumb and fingers:

Remember to take it as slowly as you feel necessary. You will get faster almost automatically as you get a better feel for what you’re doing. Now let’s try the C chord. Here’s an alternating pattern you might try:

You might now want to try alternating between the G and C chord. If you’re like me and would prefer to ease in with a bit easier chord change, then try the C major 7th which still gives you an open B string:

There. That wasn’t so bad was it? When you’ve adjusted to alternating your fingers, it really is amazing how quickly you get used to it. It’s a simple step to add suspended chords or ninths or sixths in order to come up with interesting sounding patterns. Let’s use the D chord for this example (be sure to note that we’re striking the E and D string simultaneously to start and again for the third thumb stroke):

One of the strange things about finger picking is that even though most people start out with the same basics, much as we just did, they tend to end up with very personal styles. Again, maybe this is just due to the way each person is able to use her or his hands, I don’t know. It’s just another one of those things that makes meeting and playing with other musicians so much fun.

“But, David, I play the electric guitar. I have to use a pick!”

Believe it or not, there are a number of guitarists who never use a pick, regardless of whether they play acoustic or electric. Lindsay Buckingham and the aforementioned Mr. Knopfler are probably in the “better known” section of this group. Here in Chicago, you have only to step into some of the old blues clubs to watch the past masters at work. And those of you who are into “tapping” will certainly admit to the advantages of having a free hand.

Picking Up Where We Left Off

If there really are eight million methods of finger picking then I don’t even want to guess how many “pick” picking styles there might be. But there are a few things that are important to go over … for the seasoned player as well as the neophyte.

Normally, I tend to hold a pick as I would a pencil. I’m not sure why, but this is the most comfortable feel for me. And comfort is key. As long as you’re able to get a clean hit off the strings without knocking the pick out of your hand and halfway across the room, fine. But try to have a relaxed grip on the pick. So many people hold their picks in a death-lock, I call almost hear the poor things screaming in agony.

And when I say “normally,” that’s what I mean. One of the great things about picks is that, like guitarists, they come in all sorts. Whenever I go to a music store, I try to buy another pick: a different brand, a different thickness, a different material, a different size. Sometimes I ‘m willing to settle for just a different color. This is an easy way to experiment with your sound that is just as easily overlooked. I lean towards medium gauge nylon picks myself, but if I know I want to do one of those Pete Townsend style string scrapes, then I’ll use the thickest plastic pick in my collection for that particular song. If a song has a lot of quick strumming, then I’m more than likely to use a slightly thinner nylon to get more of a bounce on my upstroke. I’ve been known to use dimes as picks for an edgy (no pun intended) (really) solo. They have a harsh sound that’s very distinct.

I should say that I know guitarists who are happy to use one type of pick and others who will use whatever happens to be lying around. And that’s perfectly fine. But, like finger picking, if there were only one “right” pick why would there be so many choices. They’re usually a quarter apiece. Have some fun.

Not only do I change picks according to the song or style I happen to be playing, I’ll occasionally change how I hold the pick in order to get a different sound. Tapping the strings, especially the higher frets on the 1st and 2nd strings with the edge of the pick (held perpendicular to the strings) yields a nice ghostly sound. On an acoustic guitar, it’s almost like one of those early 70′s ARP synthesizers. And on an electric you obviously will get a much wider range of sounds depending on the tones settings and whatever other effects you throw in for good measure.

And then there’s artificial harmonics. If you grip the tip of your pick so that when you strike the string it catches your thumb, you will hear a harmonic generated over the initial note. This is a common technique for lead guitarists and while it sounds great on an electric guitar you can also do this on an acoustic. It simply takes a little more practice.

You can also do it without a pick. When you strike the string with your finger or thumb, catch your nail on the string. This takes a little more practice, but like most things it’s amazing how easy it seems once you know how to do it.

One last thing I’d like to touch on is your strumming hand. Many people play for years and never realize how many “effects” are at their disposal by simply using their strumming hand. If you rest your hand lightly against the strings (down by the bridge/saddle of your guitar) while you strum, you get a deep staccato sound which is particularly effective on the 4th, 5th and 6th strings. Play an A minor chord like this and your brain will automatically say “Neil Young.” If you use this dampening technique to pick individual notes you will have a pizzicato effect, much like violin strings when they are plucked instead of bowed.

I guess if there’s anything at all I want you to get out of this column it is the fact that it takes two hands to play the guitar and each hand is equally important. Take time to experiment what you can do with your strumming hand. You’ll surprise yourself with what you find. Make certain that your practices include exercises to keep both hands happy and alert.

As always, please feel free to write with any questions, comments, corrections and requests. Email me directly or drop a note in at the Guitar Forums. There is no end to the help available to guitarists these days and it’s up to you to take full advantage of it, starting right here at Guitar Noise.

Picking Your Poison was written by David Hodge for Guitar Noise. A good guitar player you will be if you visit the above site. © 2012 Guitar Noise