Chords for Allen Shadd - 'Miles From The Hard Road' Flatpicking Technique

[G] _ _ _ [C] _ _ [D] _ [C] _ _
[G] _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ [G] _ _
[C] _ [G] _ _ _ [F] _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ _ _ [D] _ [G] _ _ [C] _
[G] _ _ _ _ [C] _ [G] _ _ _
_ _ _ [D] _ _ [G] _ _ _
_ _ _ [F] _ _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ _ [D] _ [G] _ _ [C] _ [G] _
_ _ _ [C] _ [G] _ _ [Em] _ _
[A] _ _ [D] _ _ [C] _ [G] _ _ _
[Am] _ _ [G] _ _ [B] _ _ [Em] _ _
[A] _ _ [D] _ _ [C] _ [G] _ _ _
[Dm] _ _ _ [Am] _ _ _ [D] _ _
[G] _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ [G] _ [C] _
[G] _ [Am] _ [G] _ [F] _ _ _ [G] _ _
_ _ _ [D] _ [G] _ _ _ [C] _
[G] _ [D] _ _ [G] _ _ [C] _ _ _
[D] _ [C] _ _ _ [G] _ _ _ [D] _
[G] _ _ _ _ _ _ Hi, I'm Alan Shad.
I'm at Dream Guitars today, and the song that I just played for you is
actually the title cut to my CD.
It's called Miles From the Hard Road.
It's a piece that
I wrote there a few years ago and played around with it at the house before I ever actually
played it out and decided to make something out of it.
[Abm] And on the CD, of course, I've
got a full accompaniment with everybody in the band and whatever.
But I actually played
that song out a lot by myself solo.
And it's fun to play for me, and I think it lends itself
pretty well to playing solo as well with a full ensemble.
_ But I've actually had a few
people question me over the internet when they would hear it or whatever and ask me,
did I play fingerstyle on that or whatever, because it does kind of sound like a fingerstyle
piece for guitar.
I do a flat pick only on that.
There's no drop fingers, no hybrid playing
or anything at all.
It's all in the pick.
And it's a combination of cross picking [G] and
just alternate back and forth.
But at some point, I actually get a pattern and it's just
more almost like a banjo roll is what it feels like to me and also play banjo a little bit.
_ So that's what it feels like to me.
It's like it's a banjo roll, but it's on guitar.
The
difference in it being a banjo roll, I also borrowed some ideas from fingerstyle guitar _
_ players simply because most flat pickers just play alternating up and down single string
stuff.
And with this particular piece, I'm actually playing some of the bass lines behind
it as well.
And it just kind of keeps the fullness of the background for me.
And that's
where everybody thinks I'm playing fingerstyle, I guess.
And when you do that and you get
a pattern going, what you're actually going to wind up doing is you're alternating one
_ lead between the bass line and then the next lead, you're actually playing the melody of
the song.
And that's the way it works for me.
And I'm not going to try to teach you
the song or anything like that at this point, but I'm just trying to break it down for you
a little bit to tell you what I'm doing.
_ And it's just the way my ideas worked on the song
and how it came together.
And I encourage people to get ideas from other genres of music
and other instruments rather than just, I mean, Dan Curry and Steve Kaufman and Doc
and everybody like that.
Of course, they're all our heroes, but at some point I don't
want to sound just like them or Tony Rice or anybody else.
And I listen to other styles
of music to get ideas.
Pedal steel was a big influence on me.
Fiddle, obviously a lot of
people are influenced by that.
But I also listen to some fingerstyle guitarists occasionally
just for something different to listen to besides just the up-down, up-down, single
note stuff of flat picking.
So that's where that came about.
And I'll kind of play a little
bit of it for you here so you understand what I'm saying.
When I say it just kind of rolls,
I almost have a circular motion going in my wrist when I'm playing that.
_ And you can start
it out slow and then build your speed up on something like that.
And if you ever get to
where you feel comfortable with that circular motion, I think it will help you in your other
facets of playing like Beaumont Rag or something like that.
It just feels more fluid for me.
So here's what I'm doing on [F] something like that [G] on one. _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [C] _ _ [G] _
[Am] _ _ [G] _ [F] _ [B] _ _ [F] _ _
[G] _ _ _ _ _ _ _ [D] _
_ [G] _ _ _ [C] _ [G] _ _ [Am] _
[G] _ _ [F] _ _ _ _ _ [G] _
_ _ _ _ _ [D] _ _ [Am] _
[G] _ _ [C] _ _ [D] _ [Dm] _ _ [G] _
_ _ _ _ [C] _ _ _ [D] _
[G] _ [C] _ _ [G] So maybe you can see where that
[C] pattern I was talking about [D] is.
And it's a pattern that a lot of fingerstyle players
do, the little pinch and then roll and pinch and roll.
So I'm doing it with a pick and
I'm just playing one string at a time instead of something like, _ _ _ _ I'm just alternating with
it instead.
So that's how the song came to be for me.
It was just some ideas that I put
together and felt good to play.
And I settled on the name basically because when I was growing
up I lived two and a half miles down a dirt road and it just kind of had that feel to
me like it's something I had played a long time and it felt like home where I grew up.
So I named it Miles From the Hard Road.
I hope you enjoyed that.
I hope it helps you
learn something and apply it to something else that you play maybe.
If you don't already
know that song you can use it in like I said other songs as well.
Thanks for watching. _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _