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Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Flatpicking Guitar Tabs for 4 Standard Fiddle Tunes

A few weeks back I got an acoustic guitar:  a pre-owned lefty Larrivee P-03 parlor guitar.  It’s a nice instrument and I’m lucky to have it.  I’m also lucky if I get in 15 minutes at the end of every other day for a little bit of flat-picking after I’m done with all my mandolin and tenor banjo playing.  Things are moving along slowly.  Coming from 4-stringed instruments and having never played guitar before, it’s pretty easy to get lost among the 6 strings.

Even on the guitar, melody is still king for me so I’m more concerned with playing tunes than strumming chords.  I’ve chosen 4 standard fiddle tunes as the first ones to learn on guitar:  Girl I Left Behind Me, Over the Waterfall, Redhaired Boy and St. Anne’s Reel.  Surprisingly, none of these tunes ever struck me as being particularly exciting to play on mandolin or tenor banjo, but the switch to guitar has brought new life to these familiar melodies.

I’ve been using the flat-picking guitar arrangements below to help memorize the tunes.  In each case I like the simple clean lines and the patterns these result in on guitar.  Perhaps there is something to these old favorites after all!





What do you think?!



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