So you’ve finally mastered the alternating-thumb picking style so prevalent in the folky fingerpicking of Americana singer-songwriters, from legends like Joan Baez and John Prine to modern stars such as Jason Isbell and Gillian Welch. Maybe now you want to add some blues or ragtime influences to your repertoire. Where do you go from here?
Double-alternation patterns in the bass, where your thumb alternates bass notes on three strings, add another layer to the rolling sound of your arpeggios. A common next step might be adding some fretting-hand movement to create melody in the treble strings while the bass strings maintain their alternating rhythm. This approach is often referred to as Travis picking, named after the late, great guitar wizard Merle Travis. But it’s also prominent in the folk-blues tradition of players like Elizabeth Cotten and Mississippi John Hurt, as well as Piedmont blues legends such as Reverend Gary Davis and Blind Boy Fuller.
When we look at top fingerstyle blues and ragtime players, we see that the bass often moves melodically, just like the treble strings. This added dimension usually leads people to exclaim, “It sounds like two people are playing!” Melodic bass lines are a great skill to add after you’ve mastered the alternating thumb style. By breaking down some common ideas with a few exercises, you’ll see that this technique doesn’t have to be too hard to learn.
Week One
Let’s compare two different moves. Example 1 has the typical double alternation in the thumb over a C chord, where every note is within the chord: the bass goes C (root), E (third), G (fifth), E (third). In Example 2, we introduce a B note on beat 4, which acts as a leading tone to C and brings us back to the root note in the repeated measure. I often use this typ