Lesson Features
The song track	The Jam along track	The Video Guitar Lesson
N/A	N/A N/A

Tabs & Lesson

 Original score by:  Jeff Fiorentino

  Transcription by:  Jeff Fiorentino

INTERNET EXPLORER IS THE SUGGESTED BROWSER TO VIEW THIS PAGE PROPERLY.

Fonts may look weird, or not line up properly in Firefox or some other browsers if you have not set them up correctly..

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Now I know many of you are rockers.  Heck I'm a rocker of sorts I guess, even though its not where my formal training was I play rock so I guess I'm a rocker.   Many of you email me about Picking.  Whether it be alternate picking or double picking or speed picking or strumming I get a lot of questions on it. 

Sadly many rock guitarists don't idolize the picking masters.  The picking masters are guys like Roy Clark just to name one many of you may have heard of. 

I know many of you hate Country style music.  I'm not a big country music fan myself.  Although I do own a couple shotguns and have been known to hunt and fish I don't own a dog and my girl never left me for a pickup truck.  So I don't relate to the music well to say the least.

But where flat picking is concerned, nothing beats these guys. 

The lesson below deals with mostly pull offs to open strings which is a common technique in this type of music.  But also your picking needs to be fast and precise as you will be bouncing off of muted notes that must be struck with the pick usually on a down stroke. 

This lesson will help you with alternate picking and going from chord to riff.  Take it slow at first and work it up to speed.  This type of music usually deals with simple chord patterns.  Our chord pattern for this lesson is,

G, C add9, G, A7, D.  With a secondary chord pattern leaving out the C add9 and replacing with C to C7.

Our scale for this type of playing is usually semi chromatic or fully chromatic.  These guys like to play notes off of each other and also double pick things which means to pick notes twice.  Really its very similar to our friend V.H. the only difference is there is a different feel to it.  LOL

Scale:  G, A, Bb, B, C, C#, D, E, F.   But also a full chromatic scale is used in certain sections.

Exercise:  Take it slow at first then work your way up to speed.  I will demo this of course.

Take note that we usually end on one of the notes in our chord and we noodle around with chromatic patterns in between chord changes.  Lots of pulling off to open here.  But its a great lesson in alternate picking and pull offs as well.  Good left and right hand strength builder as strength in both hands is needed.  

The piece below was originally written for Banjo.  I moved it to guitar.  The pull offs to open are common in this music and they are there to simulate the banjo picking which is done with all your fingers.      

Alternate pick everything, down up, down up, down up etc.  Hold the pick flat.  This is called flat picking for a reason.  The pick is not held at an angle as we often to in rock music.  The pick attacks the strings flat side down.  This actually makes for cleaner double picking in the case of this type of music but also it makes a great lesson and exercise for you to build picking accuracy from.

Be sure to palm mute the open strings to prevent ring out.  I did not tab in the X's next to the notes on the open strings due to space constraints and I wanted to make the tab easy to look at and read.  But all open strings have a palm mute to prevent ring out.  So this excercise is a good lesson on a lot of techniques that are need to effectively play any type of music really, including heavy rock.  This piece could easily be made into a serious hard rock solo on electric simply by changing the feel of it. 

Now go into the C portion of your jam above and improv using the technique.  See vid for help.

Low strings are down stroked and high strings are up stroked generally although many players alternate that around and do what is comfortable for them.  Either way its not all down strokes and its not all up strokes so find a good alternate picking mix for yourself.   

Classic ending for this sort of tune.  No pull offs here, these are picked. 

© Copyright 2005 JFROCKS