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Hi Everyone,

Today's Target and Pay Per Lesson release is now live.

Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right is a song from Bob Dylan’s second album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, his first to feature his own compositions. The song is famous for it’s rapid fingerpicking, which probably was not done by Bob. This lesson treats it a bit generically and focuses on the important embellishments that are incorporated into fairly basic patterns.

Enjoy this level 5 lesson.

http://www.totallyguitars.com/target-so ... esson.html

I think Bob was doing the pickin... I love this breakdown,,thx Neil you are worth all the money...


Don't have a bowing smiley... but :side: B)

Willem

Thanks Neil!

I played this song years ago but forgot about it. Have always liked it and like your take on it with the capo & played in the C position.

Thanks again and Happy 4t of July!

Bart

thanks Neil, I already know this one, but as usual I am sure you will have some tips that I can pick up. I am from the camp that says that Dylan definitely played the guitar part. It is also on the Whitmark Demo's CD from the era of 62'-64' and he fingerpicked that one. Yes, he strummed it at the Gaslight in 62', but that was a live coffee shop setting. Thanks again, Beaker.

beaker wrote:

thanks Neil, I already know this one, but as usual I am sure you will have some tips that I can pick up. I am from the camp that says that Dylan definitely played the guitar part. It is also on the Whitmark Demo's CD from the era of 62'-64' and he fingerpicked that one. Yes, he strummed it at the Gaslight in 62', but that was a live coffee shop setting. Thanks again, Beaker.

Beaker - Thanks for sticking up for Bob!

This isn't an ideological issue for me, but it's clear that Dylan wrote the song to be picked the way it was on the album, no matter who actually played on the track. So clearly, he could play it. Not only the Witmark Demos version (which is rough, but that was early in the song's life, and lots of those demos are rough), but also at the Town Hall show in 1963, linked below, shows that he could play it more or less the way it was played on the album.

It's still possible Langhorne played on the album, just to make sure it sounded smooth, though it sounds like Dylan to me. Dylan so often wrote and played in a simple style that people want to believe he wasn't a good player - but he was. Other tunes similar to this one that he wrote and played at the time (all of which also appear on Witmark) include "Boots of Spanish Leather" and "Girl from the North Country."

Of course, later on, he displayed yet more skill (such as on his two acoustic-traditional albums in the 90s), which he spent his whole career developing -- including on the electric. I've seen him many times, and in a few instances, he was positively smokin' on lead. "Blood on the Tracks" also reveals his skill with writing and playing fairly complex tunes.

Pay no attention to the addled verbiage on this YouTube page - I'm almost certain it's the Town Hall version.

Anyway, as to the lesson itself: this should be an interesting one for me because I've been playing this song for many years. It sounds really good the way I play it, I think, but it's also missing a lot of the little techniques contained in the original. That's because I learned the chords and, over time, started picking it out in a more or less random way. I did that with a lot of stuff, but with this song especially. I played for about 35 years before finally deciding to really learn how to fingerpick in a more-formal way, with real precision -- not just randomly picking out the notes of chords. That's when I joined this site.

I wonder whether I can incorporate some of those little techniques into the way I've been playing this for about 20 years. Might be a bigger challenge than if I were able to just start learning it now, from scratch. I have the same issue with "Cocaine Blues."

Why not video yourself playing this one Walt and post it. Break the ice. Up for it?

Eh, maybe. Not sure what good it would do anyone, since it's essentially All Wrong, but it might be interesting to see what my lifelong self-teaching has wrought. An object lesson for why people should learn things the right way, maybe.

B)