Easy Steps to Finger style Acoustic Blues Guitar I - Happy Traum Page One

Finally I have found a Guitar Lesson about finger style acoustic guitar that I can wrap my fingers around.

You could call this hybrid picking too if you wanted.

You are finger picking in normal everyday EADGBE tuning.

Basically all you need to know to get started is your open E, A7, D, C7, B7 chords and be willing to follow along with your teacher Happy Traum.

Happy stays in standard tuning and doesn't over complicate and confuse things. Happily he doesn't go too fast and the camera angles are quite good.

If its your first finger picking lesson you will garner a real solid knowledge of blues turnarounds in the key of E on various string sets that all sound the same notes but played using different intervals. And all this from fret one to fret five mostly. This is very educational and useful too. Everybody uses these intervals from Freddie King to Lonnie Mack to Stevie and Jimmy Vaughan.

Happy has us alternate strumming. That is to say: up and down doing eighth notes and its on the down that we do the alternating bass notes and on the up the higher pitched melody notes and he encourages us to get the feeling and experiment. So later we can syncopate on purpose.

Mostly its in the key of E and what's so endearing is that Happy takes his time getting us accustomed to the alternating bass and slowly introduces one or two high notes that we play with our up strum.

He doesn't rush you and foresees that some of us already know a few chords but some need to learn from scratch and that's why this is great. Frankly it not that easy to play with a steady beat and I feel like I need a few hours practice to get it on auto-pilot the way it needs to be. While doing so you will learn and have fun. There is a pamphlet too which stays focused on the basics that you need to know. You down strum with your thumb and up strum with your forefinger and middle finger. Or you can use thumb and just one finger.

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