Play blues up the neck and in open position, over an alternating thumb bass! By the end of this two-hour workshop you'll have:
- A collection of four-bar licks you can immediately plug into any twelve bar blues in E
- A clear understanding of where to use them and how they relate to the chord changes
- Easy-to-follow rules for mixing and matching those licks to create hundreds of variations on the blues
New Vocabulary For Alternating Thumb Blues
If you're a fingerstyle guitarists with a basic understanding of how to play alternating thumb blues, Travis Picking The Blues will expand your vocabulary with single-note and chord-based blues licks for the entire twelve-bar progression, and give you a reliable, repeatable way to get any new material under your fingers and into your playing as quickly as possible.
CLASSIC BLUES GROOVES
Guitarists use the term "Travis picking" as a catchall for any kind of alternating-thumb bass, and to distinguish all that from the "steady bass" approach I've focused on in previous workshops. The alternating thumb bass is integral to the entire acoustic blues lineage, from Mississippi John Hurt and Reverend Gary Davis to their musical heirs like Jorma Kaukonen and Dave Van Ronk. It can also open up a world of postwar ensemble grooves, from the electrified two-beat of 1950s Muddy Waters to the syncopated New Orleans lope of pianists like Professor Longhair and Dr. John. In this workshop, I'll show you licks and phrases that work over the blues in E, while pointing out various grooves and sounds you might apply them to as you get them under your fingers.
BLUES LICKS, CHORD SHAPES, PLAYING UP THE NECK
The alternating thumb style presents certain challenges to building a vocabulary and learning to improvise that the steady bass does not. First and foremost, with steady bass, you only need to worry about one bass note at a time, usually on the fifth or sixth string. With Travis picking, you need to think about a least two different bass notes for any chord you're on, and sometimes three. And in a similar way, as you go up the neck, you have to think more chordally than in terms of single note licks, to make sure you always have a bass note available on the fourth string – an upper bass notes – to "alternate" with whatever you're using for a lower bass note on the fifth or sixth string. In this workshop, we'll go through three different strategies to solve this: blues licks in open position, chord moves in open position, and chord voicings we can use to create licks up the neck.
CREATING LICKS OUT OF CHORDS
The good news is, once you can find those chords, you're in the right place to start creating licks that will work in the alternating thumb style. We'll start with open position licks and how to put single-note blues licks over the bass, move on to creating licks from voicings up the neck on the top four strings, and finally check out how to use Freddie Green voicings to put licks over moving bass lines and add in chord substitutions and turnaround variations, all while keeping up a rock-solid alternating thumb. Whether you're looking to accompany your own vocals with fills or create complete instrumental choruses on the blues, Travis Picking The Blues will provide you with the vocabulary you need to play the way you want to.
A Method For Improvising
Getting new licks under your fingers is only half the game. The rest is learning how to pull them out when you need them and put them where you want. I think of this second part as "practicing improvisation," and while it sounds like an oxymoron, it can be a simple, step-by-step process. Much of what seems like improvisation is more a matter of assembling existing licks than pure invention, and if you can learn the licks themselves, you can learn to mix and match them as well.
WORKING LINE BY LINE
The first step is to break the blues into three four-bar lines. Thinking about four bars at a time is easier than staring twelve whole bars in the face all at once, plus it makes sense musically to group your ideas into four-bar sections. In this workshop, I'll show you three different examples of how to play through bars 1-4, through bars 5-8 and through bars 9-12. That way, you can see not only specific ways to play over any one chord, but also hear what it sounds like to go from chord to chord and turn individual licks into whole phrases.
MIX AND MATCH PHRASES
Once you know a few different ways to play each four-bar line, you can start stringing them together to create whole choruses of the blues. This makes for more music than you might think: you've got three choices for the first line, three choices for the second line, and three choices for the third line. That makes for a total of twenty-seven different ways to construct a chorus of blues, and that's not counting mixing in any blues licks and phrases you already know.
ENDLESS VARIATIONS
Not only that: each four-bar example is really made up of a two-bar opening phrase and a two-bar response. You can mix and match those opening and answering licks too, which means there are really nine different ways to play through each four-bar line. And that means there are really over 700 ways to combine the material in this workshop. While I won't be going over every one of those combinations, I will definitely explain how to work on this material in order to be able to take apart and reassemble all of these licks on the fly.
Expand Your Fingerstyle Blues
Vocabulary and improvisation are at the heart of playing fingerstyle blues. At the conclusion of this workshop, you'll have a deeper understanding of the twelve bar blues progression, a whole collection of new blues licks to work on, and a roadmap for how to combine everything you've learned into compelling, musical solos in the alternating-thumb style. I'll go through every example on camera, pointing out essential left- and right-hand techniques, explaining why each idea and phrase works the way it does, and suggest plenty of additional ways to vary and develop the material from the class.
Register NowWhy a live workshop? How does it work?
The live stream format combines a concentrated amount of material on a specific topic with an interactive, Q&A environment that lets you get your specific questions answered while the workshop is still going on. Before this workshop starts, you'll have a PDF with notation and tab of each example I'm going to teach, so you can focus on watching and learning, knowing the note-for-note specifics are already in your hands. The whole two hours will be archived for later replay, so you'll be able to watch anything you want again for the next three months. And I'll pause at regular intervals to take questions via chat, to clear up aspects of the material that are still unclear.
Yes, you can sign up just to watch the replay later
If you can't be there Saturday morning but still want to learn from this workshop, just register as if you'd be attending live, and catch the replay later, whenever it's most convenient for you.
Sign Up Now
Travis Picking The Blues is a two-hour live-online workshop being streamed this Saturday, June 19th at 10:30AM CST. Registration is $47 and the workshop will include:
- Two hours of live-streamed online instruction
- Downloadable notation and tab of all twelve exercises
- Live chat – ask David your questions as we work through the material
- Access to re-watch the archived live stream for the next three months
