Solo Flatpicking Handbook

Hi, I'm Roberto Dalla Vecchia and welcome to Solo Flatpicking Handbook.

Generally, flatpicking guitar is associated with American traditional music, bluegrass, and folk music, requiring somebody to accompany you as you play your solos or vice versa. Having firstly a classical and secondly fingerstyle background, I found myself playing flatpicking guitar all by myself...maybe because it was hard to find someone to play this type of music where I live in Italy! This is exactly what we'll do during this course: play flatpicking guitar as a soloist. That means that even if we only play one note at a time, we want to have a rich sound, carefully mixing the melody notes with chords and basses. Needless to say, I'm not the first one to do this; many flatpickers have being doing it way before me such as Dan Crary and Norman Blake.

I've divided the course into two sections, the first being a toolkit of essential concepts. We're going to look at crosspicking, rest strokes, floating, Carter style, etc. and explore many ideas I apply on a regular basis when I'm arranging a song for solo flatpicking. Again, our goal is to have a full sound without somebody else playing back up.

In the second section, we’re going to look at eight tunes using the ideas we worked on in the first section. We'll play a right hand workout called “One More Time,” a couple of old fiddle tunes called “Bill Cheatham” and “Red Haired Boy," a traditional lovely waltz called “The Storms Are on the Ocean," and a couple of tunes I wrote as well, one very slow “Gift of a Lifetime” and one pretty fast “Ticket to Cesuna." Continuing along, we'll play an old song made famous by Elvis Presley called “Aura Lee” and finally another American traditional song in dropped D tuning called “Eight More Miles to Louisville."

For each performance study, I'll break down the tune and refer back to concepts introduced earlier in the course, finishing up each performance with a slow run through of the tune. In addition to the jam tracks you'll get for each tune, you'll get both standard notation and tablature so you can take as much time as you need to get these tunes under your fingers.

So, grab your guitars and let’s play!