Welcome to a new weekly 10-second tip.
This week we are talking about…
“Playing the bass and melody at the same time”
I get asked a lot about this style and it’s one of my all-time favourite things to do on guitar.
Specifically, I love to Travis pick in the classical, vintage way (as Merle Travis, Chet Atkins, and Tommy Emmanuel do) like you are a one-man/woman band.
I always start students off slowly with this idea and basically get them started this way…
- Choose a chord (e.g. Major) and with the thumb, pluck a bass note on every beat of 1 2 3 4.
- With your fingers, pluck a melody note on beat 1 (e.g., pluck the high E string and let it ring out throughout the bar while the bass notes chug away).
That is a good place to start.
If you can get rock solid on the above idea, you are not a million miles away from being able to do some very cool stuff like adding the melody notes anywhere – even in between the beats to add syncopation and groove.
You can hear an exciting example of this on the page below…
Find out more about the Fingerstyle 101 Video Course
…And if you want to learn how to be a one-man/woman band and play this exact style, where you are taught right from Step 1 (the super basics) all the way to Step 10 (the super exciting stuff), you can because this is a free bonus lesson that you will get this week when you get my Fingerstyle 101 video course.
Find out more at the link above.
Enjoy your Friday…
Dan Thorpe
Guitar Domination
P.S. This post was originally taken from Dan Thorpe’s private email list. To get blog posts like this sent to you which are full of great tips to make fingerpicking, strumming, and learning guitar more enjoyable (especially if you are over 40) join Dan’s list. It’s 100% free, HERE.
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