Travis Picking - An Introduction to this Popular Playing Style

 

Travis Picking is a popular playing technique in Fingerstyle guitar. It is attributed to country and wester singer and guitarist Merle Travis who was active during the mid 1900s. It is a widely used technique and is seen in many genre's of music, especially blues and folk music. The playing technique, in simplest terms, involves playing alternating bass notes on the lower strings of the guitar whilst simultaneously playing the melody notes on the higher strings of the instrument. In this post and accompanying video I want to give you an overview of the Travis Picking playing style.

Bass Notes

On the guitar, playing the bass notes with the thumb and the melody line with the other fingers is not a new technique. It has been done since standard 6 string guitars have existed. Where Travis Picking differs is that it plays alternating bass notes on alternating strings, as opposed to playing the bass notes over and over on a single string. This gives the bass line of the music more variety and interest, and also a distinctive sound. It is nearly always found in music played in 4/4 time with a bass note played on each beat of the bar. As such, the bass notes are usually played as quarter notes.

Most of the time, the bass notes will be played on the bottom 3 strings of the guitar, alternating between strings 6 and 4, or strings 5 and 4 depending on the music.

This pattern usually repeats through the whole piece if music, and moves between the above patterns usually depending on the underlying chord being played. For example, if the root note of the underlying chord was on the 5th string of the guitar, you would alternate between strings 5 and 4. If it was on the 6th string, you would alternate between strings 6 and 4.

Melody Notes

The melody notes are played on the top three strings of the guitar. Which fingers you use to play these strings is entirely up to you, but usually it will be the index and middle fingers, or the index middle and ring fingers. Have a look at my post and video, which looks at which fingers to use.

 

In most pieces of music which use travis picking, the melody line will consist of quarter notes or eighth notes played on or between each beat of the bar. These are usually played on the top 3 strings of the guitar.

Melody notes played as quarter notes on each beat of the bar

Melody notes played as quarter notes between each beat of the bar

Melody notes played as eigth notes on and between each beat of the bar

Putting it all Together

Although it seems simple to play in theory, Travis Picking can be a difficult playing style to learn. To make sure it sounds correct you have to keep time accurately, which means playing the bass notes exactly on each beat of the bar. It is very easy to get the bass notes out of time when trying to play the melody together with them, and this just messes up the piece of music. To make this style work you really have to develop thumb independence, where the thumb plays freely and independently of the other fingers. This allows you to keep time properly and ensure the bass notes are played accurately on each beat of the bar. In future videos and posts I will look at how to develop thumb independence and give some exercises on how to develop this skill. Here are a few bars from the tune Vestapol showing this Travis Picking pattern.

This has just been a brief overview of the Travis Picking technique. In future I will post up some exercises helping you to learn this technique. If you want to try yourself, many of my tabs on this website use Travis Picking, so that might be a good place to start. However, some of those pieces of music might seem quite tricky if you are not familiar with this technique.

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