Rolling Forward with the Wildwood Flower

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.

1. Learn the chords and the melody (for extra credit, learn the melody in more than one octave).
2. Work out a Carter style arrangement.
3. From the Carter style arrangement, work out the cross-picking arrangement.

Now that we have the basic melody and the Carter style version of Wildwood Flower, it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to the cross-picking version. Since the melody was played down low we’ll use the forward roll to work out the cross-picking. Because of the way cross-picking works, you’re usually starting on the melody note, and then picking through the chord. If the melody is down low we pick the higher chord notes after it, and if the melody is up high we do the opposite.

In order to keep the forward roll throughout the arrangement, I had to put a lot of the chords further up the neck of the guitar. There’s an idea here that I’m hoping is starting to catch on, and that is to work on one idea at a time until you have it worked out. That means if you’re working with the forward roll try to use the forward roll only. When in the beginning stages with anything that you might be learning, less is more. Practice and develop one idea/concept and then move on. It’s much easier to work on one idea/concept at a time. Eventually you would mix and match at will, but first master the idea/concept you’re working on. That’s what I’ve done here:

A perfect printable PDF is here.

Wildwood Flower arranged with cross-picking. As with anything new start slow, and as you master it increase the tempo.

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Happy Picking!