While working on compiling the content for my “Rhythm Factory: Acoustic Rock” course, I thought that it was important to have something inspired by the technique used by Paul McCartney in “Blackbird”. Plus, I hear a lot of Paul’s influences in the music and guitar style of John Mayer’s acoustic music.
A lot of my students want to play in this musical style. With this in mind, I suggest to try to play with a perfect groove, but with a random right-hand picking. What do I mean by this? Let me try to explain.
Typically when we play an arpeggio in fingerstyle guitar, we must play the strings involved in the melodic pattern, usually in a pattern fingered with the left hand. For random right-hand picking I mean that, while the thumb is playing the bass line, the index finger should think of something closer to a strumming accompaniment rather than an arpeggio: the melodic pattern is decided by the left hand using the muting, to mute the strings not involved in the chords and melody. This become very clear during the “main riff”.
So, while I was writing and preparing the exercise for that course, I wrote a song that I called TrueFire, dedicated to my “American family” (I’m Italian and I live in Italy). This song was chosen by Tommy Jamin to be the soundtrack for the video presentation for the new TF video/audio studio. Let’s see how it’s done and learn to play it!