Thu Dec 30, 2010 8:30 am
Hi Brad,
Nice to see you tackling this song. I spent some time on it a while back after seeing Acoustic Al's initial post, but can't say I've mastered it yet.
If you are not used to Travis picking (as I am not), the tempo of this song makes it a very tough one to learn, so don't despair that it's taking a while. You are definitely on the right track and making good progress. I do have some suggestions that might help you move forward more quickly. Bear in mind that this is not the sage advice of an expert, but just a few thoughts from the experience of a fellow struggler.
First, as Chris has suggested, take it slow. Work on it at the tempo at which you are comfortable with the most difficult parts. Not only does this sound more musical and thus more satisfying to practice, but it will also help you to coordinate the right hand work with chord changes. As Neil often says, there's a clear and simple route from playing cleanly at a slow pace to playing cleanly quickly; but there's no route to anywhere nice from playing roughly at a fast pace. So, my first suggestion is go slow.
Secondly, break it down. The intro is by far the toughest part of the song and also the most satisfying once you've mastered it. The rest of the song follows the same picking pattern and will come naturally once you've got the intro down well. So I'd suggest starting with the first few measures on the C chord, then add the transition and next few on the G chord and just cycle through that intro over and over again (at a slow pace) until you can do it without thinking. I didn't even try to move on to the next section until I was pretty comfortable with the intro at about 80% of full speed.
The transition from C to G took me many, many hours of practice to get smooth. When you slow this down, I think it will flow well for you and you can gradually build up speed. My only suggestion there is to experiment with ways of doing this that involve the minimum amount of left hand movement.
The pinky stretch to the high E (2d string, 5th fret) can be a tough reach, but your hand placement looks very good and this doesn't seem to be giving you any trouble at all. So I'm sure that once the picking pattern becomes second nature this will sound great.
As I mentioned above, I wouldn't encourage you to move on to the next section until you can do the introduction in your sleep. I'm sure this will all come naturally when you get to that point, but I do have a couple of suggestions about the chorus that might be helpful. When you move from G to the Dm, you wisely keep your pinky planted; but you let it go when you move back from Dm to G -- try to keep that pinky in place as your pivot point.
It looks to me like you are well on your way with this one. And thanks for posting it as a work in progress.
-Stuart
but its a dream to play this song and i have all the bits just need to polish it, 
