The Skeptical Guitarist: Travis Style Guitar from Scratch - Guitar Method

"Travis-picking" means that the thumb is responsible for laying down an alternating bassline while the fingers simultaneously add independent melody and harmony lines.  Here’s how we’ll achieve our goal: We’ll start with a simple alternating bass and we’ll work on it until it becomes comfortable. Then we’ll add small, successive complications that will feel uncomfortable at first, but we’ll work them it until they become comfortable, before moving on to the next. After some preliminary exercises, we get right into Six Songs You Know, two in each of three keys: “Camptown Races,” “Oh! Susanna,” “Red River Valley,” “Will the Circle Be Unbroken,” “House of the Rising Sun” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen,” and much of the rest of book is devoted to revisiting these six songs at increasing levels of complexity (four levels in all). The first level is straightforward: All melody notes land squarely on the beat. In the second level we add SYNCOPATION, where melody notes are shifted to the of