Hello, hello, hello and welcome to part 2 of Travis Pick Like a Pro where you move beyond picking repetitive patterns, to being able to pick the melody of a song with your fingers while keeping the alternating bass going with your thumb. This is called chord melody Travis picking, and it's really where things get magical. It's like I've taught you how to swing a light saber in the last part, and in this part you learn how to make that light saber jump into your hand.
Just check out how magical the sounds.
So that was actually the first song I teach in the course--"You Are My Sunshine". It was kind of a fancy version of what I'm going to teach you. I chose "You Are My Sunshine" because I mean, it is a sweet song. I don't think anyone who's taking this course would call it their favorite song. But most importantly, it's a good song for beginners just getting their feet wet in chord-melody Travis picking.
Once you learn that song, you're going to graduate to a solo that I've arranged for "Orphan Girl" We're going to circle back to that song you learned in part one, and now we're going to add a cool chord melody solo to that song so that by the end of this whole course, you'll have a song that's a complete package. You'll be able to pick it and sing it if you wish, and then you're going to have a cool solo to play in the middle of it.
And here's how "Orphan Girl" sounds.
So how do you learn to play chord-melody? Well, it's not magic, of course. It might look like magic. It might look impossible right now, but I have a systematic way of teaching it. It's worked for hundreds of my students and it'll work for you as long as you put in the effort. How much effort does it take? Well, you might recall when Yoda was teaching Luke the ways of the force, there was an awful lot of jogging through the swamp involved. Well, I'm going to take your picking hand on a marathon training session where we're going to teach your fingers and your thumb to work independently.
And the bad news is it does take a while to train that muscle memory to learn that muscle memory. The good news is, once you've learned this skill, you'll be able to do something that I would argue is more impressive and more useful than winning a lightsaber duel. So let's get started.
How's it going?
Are you loving the lesson? Confused? Have a suggestion? I'd love to hear from you.
