| Lesson 4 · Travis picking |
Hey Tomasz, There is an old teaching trick for this: tape a student's fingers to the guitar so only the thumb can play. Fingers are rebellious. They always want in early. Today yours earn their way in, dropping into the gaps between thumb notes. This is day 3 of the new course, and it is where the style properly starts:  Thumb, index, thumb, middle. The index owns the 3rd string, the middle owns the 2nd. Nobody makes decisions. The thumb stays nailed to the beat, exactly as it has all week, and the fingers fill the spaces.  Same pattern on A minor. Look at the picking hand: nothing changed at all. That's the promise of this style. Learn one right hand, and play it under everything. Try it now: 7 minutes Count "1 and 2 and 3 and 4 and" out loud. Thumb on the numbers, fingers on the "and"s. Loop one bar on C for five minutes. Then two minutes on Am. The pass mark: the thumb survives the fingers. Any stutter means slow down, not try harder. TOMORROW → nothing new at all. I'll show you why the four things you can already do are secretly a song. Pattern 1 is day 3 of the new course, with p, i and m on every picked note. No guessing whose turn it is. See The New Course Picky, mid-pattern. Talk soon,
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