I recommend learning one or two Choose Your Own Adventure songs, and then graduating to Part 2. See you there!
Let's Travis pick "Wagon Wheel". We're going to use the old standby, good old pattern three. But we're going to swing it, so check this out. This is what it's going to sound like.
Headed down South to the land of the pines, thumbing my way to North Carolina staring at the road, pray to god, I see headlights. I made it down the coast in 17 hours, picking me a bouquet of dogwood flowers, and I'm hoping for Raleigh. I can see my baby tonight.
OK first of all, if you haven't checked out the chord chart yet, I've made custom chord charts for each of these songs that I teach in this section of the course, so please bring it up on your screen or print it out so you can follow along as I teach you.
As you can see, there are still four chords in this song. If you strummed it before you know it's a four chord song. I did modify the D, however......we're playing the D/F# instead. And if you haven't seen this chord before, just grab a D chord and then wrap your thumb around on the sixth string, second, fret. If your hand's big enough and your neck is skinny enough. But if not, you can use this alternate fingering: first finger on the sixth string, second fret, second finger on the third string, second fret, third finger on the second string, third fret. You can ignore the first string because you're not playing it in this song anSo that should work fine. You may not be able to do the smooth moves that I show you here. You may need to modify them, but it should work pretty well.
Let's see here. Let's look at the picking pattern. Now we're using picking pattern number three, as I mentioned, but we're swinging it, and so, you know, normally that pattern sounds like this. But now we're going. We're using the swing fields who are picking. And this can be difficult for some people, I should mention, though you know. If you don't swing the song, it's not ruined or anything. I think the swing does add a special little charm to the song. But you know, if you're struggling with the swing but you still like the song, you could totally play it straight. But let's work on swinging it here. It's easiest to learn to swing something if you slow the tempo way down. The slower the tempo, the more people tend to swing. So you can, like, hear this exaggerated swing more and you'll be able to play it. I think if it's like really different than straight rhythm when once you speed up a swing, it becomes quite subtle and the difference between swing and straight. There isn't much difference, and so beginners can struggle with that.
So let's slow the tempo way down. Grab a G chord and just listen to me and then you try to imitate me. OK, it's like 6-43-6243. 6-43-6243. 6-43-6243. 6-43-6243. If you find this challenging, try saying it before you play it. Being able to say it in swing rhythm, helps you to play it in a swing rhythm. Once you speed up, it sounds like this. OK, so there's the swing rhythm.
In terms of smoothing, the only chord that we need to worry about with smoothing, making smooth moves between our chord changes is the D/F#. The other three chords all have an open third string. So you don't need to do anything special as you move in and out of those chords. But with D/F#, it works well to do a smooth fret going into the chord and a smooth lift going out of it. We go into the chord from a G chord, so we're going like this. And then do a smooth fret by fretting that second string, third fret with your first finger early like this. OK, so smooth fret, into the D and then smooth lift out of the D. So we go out of the D into either an E minor or a C chord. Same idea. Either way, you're going to go 6-43-624 lift. Hit that open third string early as your last note, before you go into the C or the E minor...... I move to a G there. I don't know why I did that, but anyway. Same deal going into E minor or C.
Let's see here. And then there are only other really different part of the song is in the third verse where you go "walking due South out of Roanoke". And for those sections, you know, normally you strum one strum per chord, I just strum with the backs of my fingers. Like that, I used the first, second and third fingers......backs to the nails like that. You might find it easier to like, hold an invisible pick. Imagine you're holding an invisible pick and use the back of your first finger supported by your thumb there to strum the strings. You can also use your thumb to I don't like strumming with my thumb because I grow my thumbnail out for fingerpicking. My thumbnail gets caught on the strings when I strum and it makes a bad sound, so I like using the backs of my fingers instead. All right, I hope you have fun with this song. It's a great song to finger pick. It's a fun new take on the song playing at Travis style, so I hope you enjoy it.
How's it going?
Are you loving the lesson? Confused? Have a suggestion? I'd love to hear from you.
