First let me thank once again all those guitar gurus who have indulged my frequent questions. I hope you guys don’t find it annoying for me to keep on with it.
Here’s my latest question:
I’m working on the riff that underlies the Monkees’ “Last Train to Clarksville.” It seems like it should be very simple. I even found a fingering for it.
Basically, the notes are thus (please forgive my impromptu notation):
G-G’-F-E-D G-G’-F-E-D G-G’-F-G’-B’-E-G’-B’-D
I’m having a problem with the rhythm in the bolded part. I can hear it clearly in my head, but for some reason, my pick wants to rush through the arpeggio and just play it as a chord. When I try to slow it down, it’s way too slow. I can hum the notes at the right speed, but I can’t play it in time.
I often have trouble figuring out exactly how I play things if I haven’t actually got a guitar in my hands, but I do know this riff. I play the top two notes of the arpeggio part with my fingers not the pick, sort of roll though it.
Towards the end there’s a high fast arpeggio part which I also use pick and fingers to play, you’d have to be pretty nifty to play that bit cleanly with just a pick. Think sort of banjo technique, ever heard Earl Scruggs?
While your playing Monkees songs have you tried Pleasant Valley Sunday?
Or the riff to Suzy Q (link to Gibson.com website where Arlen Roth teaches the lick). Brutal, but I am having a ton of fun working on it.
Or the riff to SRV’s Pride and Joy - the raking-upstroke Texas Shuffle that he innovated is hard to learn to groove on - but most folks who play the song don’t even attempt it, which is more frustrating…
Hybrid picking - the pick-finger-finger type stuff - is a total blast. I started doing it by playing Spirit in the Sky in A and just evolved from there.
Holding the pick in the usual fashion and using the second and sometimes third fingers as well is standard country technique. Some players put a fingerpick on the second finger (for example, James Burton). Some grow their nails. It works. Lots of country licks depend on this technique, which probably comes from banjo players.
I just play the bolded Clarksville bit with alternate picking. One and two and three and four. The tricky part is hopping over the intervening string to get to the E on the upstroke. I find that rotating my hand slightly at that point helps the tip of the pick avoid the string i.e. so that instead of the pick being in a roughly horizontal plane, the plane of the pick is tilted towards me.
Don’t learn wussy folk style fingerpicking, do it right and start here.
I’m currently re-learning some of those pieces that I learned about twenty years ago (and subsequently forgot (and lost the book)). Amazingly there’s still some muscle-memory helping me out though I haven’t played those tunes in over ten years.
Exactly - I use the flesh of my fingertips - fingerpicks don’t feel right and don’t stay on, and maintaining my nails is a pain. Plus, I can do “chord grabs” with the pick and my fingers and snap 3 - 4 strings, which really pops the sound.
I have drifted into some country licks, but, like folky fingerpicking, those tend to focus on patterns - banjo rolls, etc. Don’t get me wrong, they are totally cool riffs, but my preference is to be more spontaneous - kinda just using my fingers to expand my options at any given point in a rhythm or lead riff, so I have places to go, can mix up my sound and don’t get stuck in a corner with my technique.
Right now, playing that Suzie Q riff that I link to above is fun (**Saintly Loser **- you’re right; this is a James Burton lick) - you can lay down a solid rhythm and intersperse lead licks using your fingers - but the momentum is not compromised because your pick is bangin’ along on the low E. So it is like rag-time fingerpicking in that sense, but more aggressive in feel and Rock in tone.
Prepare to be confounded! It’s like trying to learn to ride a completely different kind of bicycle after feeling comfortable on the one you’ve had for years…
I’m working at home, so I had to grab my Strat and try it. Harder than it looks and sounds, that’s for sure. It’s funny, I can play it pretty well right off the bat without a pick, using my thumb, index and middle fingers, and I can do the Clarksville riff perfectly that way. This is due to my years of folk picking, I guess. As soon as I try the hybrid way, spasticity ensues. I will go back to work, I will go back to work…
This is great. I think I’ve managed to figure out most of the notes. Is this right? (Bass note in italics, “-p-” for pull-off, “-h-” for hammer-on)
dE aE**-h-g E D-h-eE eE A BE D GE
After many years of using a flatpick, including several years dedicated to bluegrass flatpicking, I started learning to hybrid pick a couple of years ago. I use a Fred Kelly Slick Pick thumbpick, and combine fairly short fingernails and the fleshy part of the fingers on my right hand. I’ve worked out some Brent Mason type chicken-pickin licks, and recently started working on some Jerry Reed/Chet Atkins material. Although you may run through lots of picking patterns with these styles, the goal is to get your right hand fingers to play independently from one another. I learned some of this technique many years ago when a guitar instructor I had got me into some chord melody and ragtime style playing. By far the most challenging music is the Jerry Reed stuff. He may have represented a bit of a buffoon, but the man was a guitar playing genius. I’m being stretched in directions that I didn’t even know existed, and I am not by any means new to guitar.
