Choose Your Own Adventure

Once you get comfortable with Travis picking, one really fun thing you can do is go find a song you like. Not necessarily a song that is normally Travis picked. But then you can teach yourself how to Travis pick it. Pretty much any song in 4/4 can be Travis picked in theory, and I just I personally find it really fun to take songs, you know, sometimes like rock songs, songs that wouldn't normally be Travis picked and give it that kind of country sound to it. Mellow it out a little bit. You can often get really cool results, so I want to give you a little taste of that now.

What we're going to do is I want you to try Travis picking one or more of the following songs. These are all songs that I teach you how to strum in the Member's Area. And so if you've been a member of Heartwood Guitar for a while, you're probably familiar with some of these songs. If not, if you're jumping right into this Travis picking course, a beginning guitarist, you may want to go back and take one of these song lessons to learn how to strum it first. If you think that would kind of flatten out your learning curve a little bit. Or you can just try jumping into one of these lessons. You decide what you can tolerate, but just know that these lessons are more stripped down than, like my lesson on "Orphan Girl". They're simpler lessons where I just teach you the picking pattern and the chord shapes and give you a few tips on how to smooth out your chord transitions.

Each of the songs is about the same level of difficulty, except for "Me and Bobby McGee". That one is significantly harder just because there's a lot more chords in it, because there is a key change in the middle of the song.

Also, "Folsom Prison Blues", while it isn't significantly more difficult than the other songs, I do have you triple alternating the bass in that song.

All the other songs just use the picking pattern number three pattern, which you're already familiar with. It's the one we used for "Orphan Girl", but "Folsom Prison" has that added triple alternating bass, which will take a little extra time to train your picking hand in learning.

Before you dive in, let me just point out something about the chord charts that I've created for the choose your own adventure songs. Each chord chart has a line underneath the chord guide that says starting note. That starting note is the first note that you sing in the song. The way you use this is, for example, with "Let It Be" it says the starting note is a G, which is the open fourth string. Assuming you're playing it at capo five, you just play that open fourth string. That note is a note, and what you can do is match your voice to that note, That's the first note you sing. When I find myself in times of trouble.....See how that works?

If you play in a different capo position, that open fourth string instruction still applies. It's going to be a different note because the capo position right? Capo 7. The note will be there. It's no longer a G note, but those instructions on where to play it still apply.

OK, go ahead and choose one or more of the choose your own adventure songs to learn. The more you learn, the better you'll be at picking chords, which will better prepare you for part two of this course, where we start weaving in the melody. And that's truly where the magic happens, with Travis picking. So, really excited to teach you that skill. All right, have fun.

How's it going?

Are you loving the lesson? Confused? Have a suggestion? I'd love to hear from you.