The sound of the steel-string guitar is synonymous with the sound of rootsy styles like country, bluegrass, and Americana. Whether you’re looking to learn the basics of boom-chuck strumming, some hot flatpicking licks, or how to play Western swing, you’ll find it here.
Crosspicking is an essential technique in the bluegrass guitar toolkit. Here's a bluegrass guitar crosspicking lesson from Molly Tuttle.
Learn the rhythm guitar techniques used in Western Swing music in this video lesson.
ADVERTISEMENT
Learn Travis picking, a style of fingerpicking characterized by a steady alternating bass that underscores rhythmic patterns and melodies on the treble strings.
Grammy Award-winning roots musician Cathy Fink teaches licks drawn from folk, country, and bluegrass, perfect for warming up or songwriting on guitar.
Cash played the original version - which features just three chords - with a capo on the first fret.
ADVERTISEMENT
While the guitar playing is superlative throughout all ten of the album’s tracks, the duo’s work on Bob Dylan’s “Señor (Tales of Yankee Power)” truly stands out.
Popularized in the film ‘O Brother, Where Art Thou?,’ this classic American folk song has antecedents that trace back over 200 years.
Though the picking is rather straightforward, there are some challenging techniques to deal with.
ADVERTISEMENT
This flatpickers' favorite is ubiquitous at old-time, Celtic, and bluegrass jams.
Among the many cool moments of Molly Tuttle’s variations are the jazz-informed block chords that suddenly appear in bars 61–65.
Learn this campground jam favorite, recorded by artists like Bob Wills' Texas Playboys, Doc Watson, and Clarence White.
ADVERTISEMENT
Grab a flatpick and a metronome and set aside a generous amount of time in the woodshed, as in this lesson you’ll work on the blazing guitar leads and swinging rhythmic accompaniment.
Guitarist Jody Stecher plays this country standard in F major, a key he finds has a sonic atmosphere all its own.
The song has a fairly simple structure, with two main repeating sections, a chorus and a verse, and instrumental solos played over the chorus progression.
Learn to maintain the right pick direction when playing hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides.
ADVERTISEMENT
This excerpt of “Down in the Willow Garden” is arranged to be played with a plectrum. I play the melody on the low strings and the accompaniment on the high strings.
So here it is, our first bass/strum move. It’s not so different from doing four straight downstroke strums, except that the first strum is replaced with a single note, the root of the chord.
Bringing together elements of early popular and country music, swing jazz, blues, and rural dance hall traditions, Western swing is pure vintage American music.
ADVERTISEMENT
Since each note of a diatonic major scale belongs to more than one chord within a key, each note can serve as a bass note for several different chords in that key. Take a look at B, the third note of the G scale: it’s the root of a Bm…
A popular song in the ‘50s and ‘60s, often sung at civil rights rallies.
Carter-style guitar playing may be primarily based around first-position chord shapes, but within that simple framework there are plenty of ways to make the music come to life.
ADVERTISEMENT
Learn to adapt the country boom-chuck rhythm to rock songs.
Looking at bass notes this way gives you some flexibility to begin working melodic lines into the otherwise-basic chord progressions in the Carter Family repertoire
Posted by Scott Nygaard After you’ve settled into the basic bluegrass and country boom-chuck rhythm pattern, you’re bound to start looking for something else to do with your fingers to help embellish different parts of a song. One easy way to do this is to add bass runs between chords.…
ADVERTISEMENT
The boom-chuck beat is one of the first rhythms guitarists learn, and for good reason: you can play thousands of acoustic-guitar songs in this style.
