Welcome to our Travis Picking course part 2! In this second part of the course, we will build upon what we have already learnt and take things up a notch! We will start by learning two new finger-style patterns which we will apply to some new 7th chord shapes. These 7th chords will expand your open chord shapes and help explain what comes next, after the basic major and minor triad chords. We then tackle a beautiful folk tune to ensure you apply all of your new skills!
We will step up our travis picking skills by learning a pattern that spans an entire bar, rather than just a half bar. We will learn two variations of this pattern to help step up the difficulty a little more gradually. Use the tab to slow down the pattern and get it perfect before moving on.
For our next song, we will be pushing you to not only play the harder Travis picking patterns but also trickier chord shapes. In later courses, we will look at 7th chords in more detail, but for now the 3 chords that you should know can be found in the fretboard diagrams. You may already be quite familiar with the major 7th chord!
There are three main types of 7th chord: major, minor and dominant. Each of these 7th chords have very distinctive sounds that you should start to get familiar with. You will notice that both the major 7th chord shapes sound different to the dominant 7th shape. Here is a useful description of each that may help:
Dominant 7th: An unresolved slightly edgy sound that raises more questions than answers!
Major 7th: A chilled out, relaxing sound that is completely resolved.
What do you think? Do you hear something different? If you do then that’s great, decide what you think the sound is like and then next time you hear one of these chords on record you will know what it is!
This is a classic folk style tune that fits perfectly with the travis picking style. This song includes the two new picking patterns that we have learnt as well as a variety of chord changes, making it the most challenging song that we have tackled yet. Listen to the song here and then get stuck in with the next video!
We will start by taking a look at the verse and intro. The chord news is that they are identical, so we only need to learn one set of chords here. To begin with let's take a look at the chord shapes in the fretboard diagrams.
Here are the chords in order for the verse and intro sections, which is all you need to worry about for the moment!
We will now take a look at the chorus and then piece the entire song together. The chorus uses a slightly different picking pattern, as shown in the tab below, and a different set of chords. The chorus chords can be found in the fretboard diagrams
Here is the full chord chart, including the choruses that we are currently learning. Be aware that the final chorus goes around twice as long as the first. In the music industry, they call this a 'double chorus'!
Take a look at the tab for the full chord chart. This will help you gradually piece the song together and also allows you to slow the song down as much as you like. As well as the video file on the tab, there are audio files that allow you to focus on the guitar without the vocals and other guitar parts.
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