A beginner's approach to Travis Picking

I had a great song request from a Skype student recently that got me teaching some Travis picking patterns. The song was 'Just Breathe' by Pearl Jam and it uses a picking pattern heard in other songs like Kansas' 'Dust In The Wind' or Fleetwood Mac's 'Landslide'.

A Travis picking pattern is one that has a constant alternating thumb pattern on the quarter note beat, with the index and middle fingers plucking in between the beats. It's a great way to bring driving, rhythmic feel to any chord progression.

In this video lesson I take you through how you should try and practise a Travis picking pattern progressively in stages to really get confident in the picking hand. The key things here are to build up the pattern gradually, always use a metronome and try to keep things musical and interesting for your practice sessions.

You can download a free .pdf of the TAB with all the examples demonstrated in the video by clicking here.