Posted by Ari Eisinger on January 21, 2004, 8:41 pm, in reply to "Blind Willie Johnson's Standard tuning technique. Help!" --Previous Message--
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I think one of the keys to it is to treat it as flatpicking, i.e., playing either one note at a time or strumming. I don't mean it's necessarily done with a flatpick, just that it's not fingerpicking in the usual sense because there are no bass at the same time as treble notes. One advantage of the one-note-at-a-time approach is that you can play more different melody notes than you could if you always had to keep the chord fingered, as you do in fingerpicking. In this style, you can play any notes you want as long as they don't keep you from getting back to the chord in time for the "boom-chang" part.
: Hi all, anyone master the style used by Blind
: Willie on his non slide tunes, specifically
: Soul of a Man and John the Revelator as
: examples. IN the liner notes, Samuel
: Charters says that Stefan Grossman told him
: it was a G chord held and picked around. I
: also noticed in the Soul of a Man movie by
: Wim Wenders in the PBS series that the
: reenactment, it looks as though Chris King is
: doing that, altough using his first and
: second fingers to chord the 5 and 6th
: strings, then using his ring finger to hammer
: at the fifth fret. Anyway, I can't get it to
: sound like he does, and I'm missing
: something. Anyone who has this down please
: help. Thanks, Len
:
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