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Home ❯ Topics ❯ Travis Picking Fingerstyle ❯

Creating a Travis Picking arrangement over C-G-Am-F

Lesson #247 • Jul 16, 2019

Video Overview

Instructional PDF 3 pages

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It includes all of my notes for this lesson, allowing you to follow along at your own pace. You're free to download, print, and share the PDF across your devices.

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Editor’s notes

In this lesson I’ll show you two different fingerstyle arrangements I put together using the chords C-G-Am-F, both of which are inspired by the Vampire Weekend song “Hold You Now”. Normally, when a song gets in my head I’ll casually strum it when playing guitar – but for this song, I found myself gravitating toward the Travis picking fingerstyle. This was a first for me, so I wanted to capture it in my practice log and share these two exercises. They both use the same chord progression and bass notes, but it’s the right-index-finger melody notes that are slightly different between the two exercises. I’ll talk you through some of my process, and of course show you the tabs. I hope you enjoy!

Video timestamps:

  • 0:00 Playthrough & boring talking stuff
  • 2:27 Right hand bass notes
  • 3:44 Left hand chord shapes
  • 4:45 Full tab, variation #1
  • 5:28 Full tab, variation #2
  • 6:30 Final tips

Vampire Weekend’s “Hold You Now”

Here’s the official audio for the song that inspired me, if you want to hear it:

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