Here’s a fingerpicking idea I’ve been kicking around for a while, though I couldn’t figure out a great way to present it till now.
It’s a challenging series of ultra-syncopated variations on traditional Travis picking — a funky fingerstyle challenge.
I started down this path while trying to create one of those fake-out song intros. You know — the kind that starts with solo guitar, and you think you know where the beat is. But then the drums come in, and your head spins as you realize you were perceiving the downbeat in the wrong place. What if, I thought, you started with Travis picking that, unbeknownst to the listener, was displaced by a 16th-note? That would guarantee a rude awakening when the beat kicked in.
I tried the pattern that way and found it nearly impossible. It took some slow, brain-twisting practice to play those familiar alternating-bass patterns with the rhythmically accented thumb notes falling on offbeat 16th-notes. (And it took even longer for it to feel natural and start grooving.) Maybe the technique comes naturally to some minds, but not mine!
I expand on the notion here when a lesson covering all the possible permutations. It’s more than a mental exercise: The musical implications are vast. As cool as traditional Travis-picking is, and for all the variation it permits, it’s almost inevitably locked into a sort of barn-dance feel with the accents fixed on beats 1 and 3. Learning to shift those accents has many benefits: It develops rhythmic independence. It lets you deploy your thumb in unusual syncopations. And it unlocks a world of funky grooves suitable for Latin and African music, bitchin’ new hybrids, and of course, the fake-out intros that inspired the idea.
I hope you find the concept as compelling as I do. Happy picking!
You can download the notation and tab for these exercises here. It’s a PDF file that you can save and print.
Leave a Reply