Chords for Arkansas Traveler - Guitar Lesson

Hey everyone, my name is Ryan, you are at MusicWithRyan.com, your place for bluegrass
guitar, acoustic guitar, and so much more.
Today's lesson is going to be the traditional fiddle tune, Arkansas Traveler, and I'm going
to work out of it in the key of D, in D position, open D.
Beginning, intermediate arrangement
here, pretty straightforward.
[N] So let's first go ahead and give the arrangement a listen to so you can see what you're working with here.
[D] Alright, _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ [Dm] _ _ _ [B] _ _
[D] _ _ _ _ [E] _ _ _ _
_ [Bm] _ _ [Dm] _ _ [Em] _ _ _
[A] _ _ [Bm] _ _ [Dm] _ _ _ [E] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
_ [D] _ _ _ _ _ so [Eb] as you see, pretty straightforward arrangement, sticking real close to that melody.
I've got a couple tricky licks in there just to keep you on your [N] toes with some hammer-ons
and pull-offs, but again, pretty straightforward for you flat pickers out there.
If you'd like, what I'm going to do is walk through this lesson measure by measure, close-ups
of the left and right hands, so you can master exactly what I'm doing in this arrangement
and get some of this technique stuff down.
And I'd ask you to go over to my website, musicwithryan.com, and there you can check
out the full-length lesson and get about 15, 17 minutes of the video, tabs for the tune,
and backing tracks.
And I've got some other material over there as well, e-book and other arrangements that
you can check out all in this style, in this bluegrass old time style so far.
But right now, we're going to go [D] ahead and walk through this tune measure by measure.
If you're really digging the lesson, please subscribe to my page and many more will follow.
So here we go.
All right, so let's go ahead and break this tune down.
And for those of you new to my videos, [N] the markings on the bottom of the staff are the
pick direction, the down-ups.
And if there's numbers on top of the staff, little numbers that are not the tab, those
are my left-hand fingerings.
And I strongly suggest, [D]
especially for achieving what I'm going for in the arrangements, that
you kind of follow those _ fingerings closely just as well as you would the pick directions.
Okay, so the song, Arkansas Traveler, key of D.
Again, we're working on a D position.
Some people capo up on the second fret, but I like playing this out of open D.
_ So I'm going to go ahead and start, play the first few measures for you there.
And it starts on beat four, the chord note on beat four.
And I'm going to be using, kind of working on this shape, _ _ _ _ [D] _ _
_ kind of a different little
D chord there. _
I'm not used to that.
We're going to get into it right now.
[Bm] So cool.
So beat four starts on, so like one, two, three.
_ _ [E] _ _ _ _ [Bm] _
_ _ [A] _ _ _ [D] _ _
I'm going to stop right there.
[A] The circle, if there's a note with a circle around it, that's a half note and it gets two counts.
_ _ _ Three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
One, two, [E] _ _ _ [Bm] _ _ _ [A] _ _
_ [D] three, four.
Okay, [E] so the only tricky part there is the pull off and [N] it creates a double upstroke.
Again, a pull off or a hammer on takes the place of a pick [A] direction.
_ _ [D] _
_ [Em] _ [Bm] Up, up.
_ And you notice I keep [E] that third finger pressed down and that's going to ring [B] out as I'm playing
this note here on the G string.
_ That note [A] will ring.
_ [E] _ _ _
[Bm] _ _ [B] _ _ [A] _ _ _ [D] _
Four.
And again, after [B] those little eighth notes, I just have a series of quarter notes and
there's downstrokes, of course.
_ Down, [A] down, down.
_ [D] _
_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _
[B] _ _ _ [A] _ _ [D] _ And I want to keep this third finger [G] down for a couple reasons.
_ I want it to ring.
I [B] want it to sound more connected, to eliminate some overtones that I don't want.
And I'm going to go back to it.
I have no need to leave it because I'm going to, or to remove it.
I'm going to go back to that note at some point.
[A] And you [E] _ _ [Bm] _ _ _
[A] _ _ _ [D] _ see I didn't move it, so it's ready [Ab] when I need it, so to speak.
[D] _ _ _ [B] _ _ [D] _
_ _ _ [B] _ _ _ [D] _ _
_ _ _ _ _ [E] _ _ [B] _
_ [A] _ _ _ _ [D] _ _
Okay?
[G] Moving on, more quarter note. _ _ _ _