20 Minutes To… Better Acoustic Folk
Take your playing to the next level with some of the most useable patterns and shapes for acoustic guitar, all inspired by the greats in folk music
From early folk giants, such as James Taylor and Bob Dylan to today’s acoustic heroes, Ed Sheeran, Ben Howard and many more, there’s a wealth of artists to get you into this ever-buoyant genre. Generally with folk you’ll be playing fingerstyle, but standard strumming is commonplace too and sounds great with open-string drone chords. Altered tunings feature heavily and will help bust you out of any creative rut. Joni Mitchell reputedly made use of over 60 tunings to help her play different songs!
We’ll begin our tutorial with a look at Travis picking. Named after country fingerstyle great, Merle Travis, this technique can be applied to almost any chord progression you like so the creative juices should really begin to flow once you’ve got the basics down. At its heart it’s simply a matter of playing an eighth note bassline with your thumb while your first, second and third fingers play in between on the treble strings. Try out our exercises and get the basics down.
Practice Plan
1. One minute: Play through one exercise slowly
2. Two minutes: Slow down further, concentrating on the picking movements
3. Two minutes: Gradually build speed
4. Try out the other examples
Each of the tab exercises represents an idea or technique that you can apply to other chords. For our first and second examples change the chords and re-use the fingerpicking patterns. Almost any chord will work. The last two examples require you to identify the shapes we’ve used and think of musical ways to move them around the fretboard. Not every chord will sound great, so experiment!
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