Alt Chord Picking in G

In this lesson, Charlie introduces a little piece with a country feel in the key of G. A good piece to practice your alternate picking.

The diagrams below show the position of the fingers on your left hand to play the basic chords used in this lesson.

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In case you missed it ...

Ok, we're just looking at a little country feel in the key of G.

I'm just playing the chords G Major, C Major and D Major. So we're alternating from our G bass to to our D bass ... And when I go to my D chord, I just simply play my D bass to start ... followed that through with a chord ...then playing my A bass ... followed through with the chord ...

G chord ... D chord ...

So to give my rhythmic pattern a little bit of variation, when I get to my C chord ... I'm going to play an alternate pick: down on my A string, up on my D string, down on my G, up on my B string ...

Let's take a close up look at what I'm doing with my right hand ...

So going through both of those ideas, using my alternate bass on my G chord and my alternate picking on my C chord, alternate bass on my D chord. So we just break them up nice and slow and even and let you have a look at them a bit closer.

G chord ... into my alternate picking on my C chord ... to my D chord ... back to my G chord ...

Now, there is nothing stopping you from changing those ideas around, so we might want to alternate pick the G chord, and alternate bass the C chord. It really is up to you how you play them.

The other thing I wanted to do is just have a little bit of a look at this little country ending that I placed at the end of the chord changes.

So what we do is we start here with our third finger on a G note, it's the third fret of the G string: G, F#, G ... play my open A string ... B, A, B ... onto my C note, third finger on the third fret of the A string ... open D string ... to my E ... back to my open D ... C, B, A, G ... instead of finishing with the G note, I'm going to finishing with the G chord.

That pretty much takes care of our 1-4-5 progression in the key of G. G Major chord, D Major chord, C Major chord. We're playing our alternate bass on our G chord, alternate bass on our D chord and little alternate picking on our C chord. Like I said earlier, you can change those around, swap the method around on each chord. It's purely up to you. And finishing with our little country or bluegrass ending in the key of G. Have a lot of fun with it, I'll see you next time.

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