Too many notes! Now that we’ve worked out the melody reduction and cross-picking arrangement in the upper register, it’s time to drop it down an octave and repeat the process. First off we have the melody reduction. Here it is with the melody, and chords: + Since we’re in the lower register we’ll be using […]
Too many notes! If you’ve seen the movie Amadeus then you might remember the scene where the emperor tells Mozart this, and that he should remove a few. I’m sure, like Mozart, Colonel Sanford C. ‘Sandy’ Faulkner would be asking, “Which few did you have in mind?” Mr. Faulkner would probably be aghast at the […]
This ol’ boy was traveling through the Ozarks with his rucksack and fiddle strapped across his back. As he stopped to catch his breath he looked across the expanse of forest and mountains. With a head full of fresh mountain air he sat down, pulled out his fiddle, tuned the strings, and composed this little […]
This is the third part of a series of posts that are transcriptions of each of David Grier’s solos from this video posted on Fretboard Journal. If you didn’t see the first one, you can find it here. This solo starts at about the 2:07 mark in the video. At this point he ramps it up to about 280 bpm! […]
Since repetition is the mother of mastery let’s go over the ideas I use for working up a cross-picking arrangement of a song, or tune. Learn the chords and the melody (for extra credit, learn the melody in more than one octave). Work out a Carter style arrangement. From the Carter style arrangement, work out […]
This next song is one that everyone seems to learn at some point when they are working on Carter style or Cross-Picking. I figured I would run through all the steps on this beautifully simple and very popular tune. The song itself is rarely sung, but more often played as an instrumental. So, what’s the […]
In the last post I showed how to arrange a tune in Carter Style, and now we’re going to extend that into a slight variation using the same concept. Octave displacement is when you take a note, chord, or melody, and play it an octave higher, or an octave lower. In the last post we played the […]
So far we’ve covered the forward roll, and the backward roll. If you haven’t learned them yet you can see the forward roll here, and the backward roll here. The next step is to start putting these patterns to use creating cross-picked arrangements of any tune that suits your fancy. It’s best to start with something simple, and then […]
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