One of the stumbling blocks for most guitar players is string crossing: anytime you have to play on a higher string and cross over to a lower string, or the reverse, moving from a lower string to a string above. I’ve created an exercise that uses both of these string crossings. They’re doubles, or played […]
Like the wonderment Dorothy must have felt traveling that yellow brick road, I too tend to feel that same wonderment when working on hammer-ons, pull-offs, and slides. Especially when used in the context of a tune. There are several reason why we might use these slurs, but the most important to me is variation. Another […]
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 […]
At this point in the video (2:36 to be exact) Grier is practically at string melting velocity. Yeehaw! He’s clocking somewhere from 308 to 320 bpm! As with anything that you’re trying to learn, always start very slow, and with a metronome. So here’s the fourth and final part of David Grier’s solos from this video posted […]
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 […]
This is the last part of the series on slurs. So far we’ve talked about hammer-ons, and pull-offs, and now we’ll be exploring slides. One of the things that I haven’t mentioned about the slurs is their lyrical quality. The voice has a very smooth transition from note to note, unless the vocalist chooses otherwise, but plucked […]
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