| Lesson 9 · Travis picking |
Hey Tomasz, My favourite lesson so far, because it's the moment people hear themselves playing music instead of patterns. It's also how the second song in the full course opens. Play your pattern 2 bar on C. Now play it again, but lift your fretting index finger off the 2nd string so the pinch grabs the open B instead:  Your hand barely moved. One note changed, and the bar became a different bar. Play those two back to back and the moving note stops being part of the pattern. It becomes a melody, sitting on a bass line. Two parts, one guitar.  Strip the accompaniment away and there is the tune, on one string, over a chord that never changes. Two things make it sing. Let the melody ring louder than everything else. And when the bass falls apart the moment the melody gets interesting, the fix isn't your fingers. It's your attention. Aim your mind at the thumb and let the fingers get on with it. Try it now: 8 minutes Bar one with the melody at the 1st fret, bar two with it open. Loop the pair, slow. Exaggerate the mix: melody loud, bass almost a whisper. It'll feel silly. It'll sound professional. The pass mark: record ten seconds. If you can hum the top line back, you're playing a melody. TOMORROW → the map that makes every chord you've learned snap into one system. Those two bars are literally how the second song of the course opens. In the full twenty days it grows into a complete 16-bar piece, taught two lines a day inside the player. See The New Course Picky heard the tune. Talk soon,
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