| Lesson 1 · Travis picking |
Hey Tomasz, Merle Travis, the man the style is named after, played the whole thing with two digits. A thumb and one finger. So here's lesson one. Your fingers get the day off, and you need nothing but a guitar. The full twenty-day course can wait.  The thumb owns the two middle bass strings. The fingers answer on top, later in the week. Don't fret anything yet. Lay your left hand flat across the strings to mute them, and let the thumb play dead thumps. No chord, nothing to get wrong.  Fifth string, fourth, fifth, fourth. One thump per beat, like a heartbeat. Try it now: 5 minutes Mute the strings. Thumb only: 5th, 4th, 5th, 4th, one per beat. Slow enough that it never stutters. A metronome at 60 is plenty. The pass mark: count "1, 2, 3, 4" out loud while it walks. If talking derails it, go slower. It feels too simple. That's correct. Everything else in these ten days gets stacked on top of it. TOMORROW → the two chord shapes that turn those thumps into music, and the switching trick most people never get told. This one move is what my NEW interactive Travis-Pick in 20 Days course is built on. Twenty days, four complete songs, and it runs inside the Acoustia player you get with it. See The New Course Picky found the heartbeat. Talk soon,
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