Love me some good old-fashioned country blues.
Even though, Tuesday Blues Lesson #007 was meant to be a challenging pinky exercise, I couldn’t help but start thinking about the possibilities of creating a little tune from that melody.
In this lesson, we’ll apply the picking pattern from Tuesday Blues #007 to a plain-Jane C major chord. The thing is that with just a little country blues treatment, this plain-Jane chord, is anything but.
Continuing the Country Blues Fingerpicking in C
Remember, that as with a lot of the acoustic blues that we cover, we’ll be using an alternating bass line thumped out with your thumb. This is very important. It’s the very bedrock of this lesson and of course it’s used in countless Piedmont tunes. So, if you need to brush up on your alternating bass, refer back to this lesson:
Piedmont Blues: Cracking the Piedmont Picking Code
I highly recommend working with a metronome to make sure that you are keeping a steady beat while your working on your thumb’s rhythm.
In the video, we’ll overlay a simple melody over the alternating bass line. Now, I’ve said this before but, when I say simple….I mean, musically simple. The way the melody of Old McDonald is simple. That doesn’t mean that this is easy. Quite frankly, attempting to keep a steady bass line and play a melody at the same time is inherently difficult. Doesn’t matter how simple the melody is.
That said, practice makes this easier.
Make sure to watch the video all the way through if you’d like to take this idea one step beyond the basics.
What’s Up Next?
I’ll take you through a short lesson on what we’ll do over the D Chord (Hint: It’s pretty close to lesson #) and then show you how to put this together in a creative way.
Twelve bar? Eight Bar? Sixteen Bar Blues? Not sure yet, as of today, I’m still working that out. But, I can tell you that next week’s lesson will pull this all together and stretch your knowledge of country blues pickin’ a bit so stay tuned.
Get it? ‘Tuned’.
Seriously, keep your guitars tuned folks. 🙂