Description

Fingerstyle guitar wizard Duck Baker teaches how to play the gospel tune "Farther Along".

Transcript

Duck Baker Teaches Farther Along Hi, I'm Dart Baker. And we’re here to do some gospel tunes arranged for finger style guitar. Various different kinds of gospel tunes and the idea here is that they shouldn’t be too difficult for somebody who has some experience with folk style finger picking. So hopefully, you know how to play some John Herd or some Elizabeth Cotton or stuff like that and would be able to use that as a sort of base for what we’re going to do here. Let's start of by getting our guitars in tune. Starting with that low E string, here it comes and harmonic, let's come across the A string. And here’s the D and the G. Here’s the B string and the high E. The first tune we’re going to learn is a tune called Further Along and this song is pretty well known in southern churches but a lot of people had never been to southern churches know this song because it was a song recorded several times by the great Bill Monroe, the daddy and inventor of Blue Grass music. And we’ve got a fairly simple version of this tune I’ll show you how it goes [Demonstration] Now, looks like we’re going to play Further Along here. Possibly the most difficult thing about this arrangement is the fact that it's in three or four time. Other than that, there's nothing real tricky, but because it's in three four and instead of doing the kind of alternating base that we’re used to in C and you should be used to that if you’ve never played John Herd or—anybody else. This is more like this. It's like waltz time, it's like you're hitting two upbeats and you have to alternate from that way. And once you’ve gotten used to that idea, we’re doing that in C and there's not much else to it. When we go to an F chord, we don’t even need to make a whole F, our thumb comes down and this is something that hopefully you’re used to as using that thumb especially on the F. And then the little finger where I add sometimes to the chord, back to C. I think the thing it’s going to be harder to get used to is those two base notes going up. And when we come back to the C, there's a moment there where the little finger has to go up the neck just a couple of frets so it just slides up from the C on the third fret of the high string up to the A on the fifth fret. And when that happens on the same time that we play the open four string for fortune then back down to C. There's another sort of passing chord in here, it's one of the easiest chords you can get. It's an Am7th. And it just looks like a C without our ring finger down then we have a form of D7th or D9th if you want to be technical. Again, the thumb comes over always on to play the second fret for that F# on the base note. And then when we go to G this time, we have a little sort of simple base run. Then I guess we repeat all that and this time we have just a little hint of C7th and that’s the same, up and then up again. Now, what's going to happen on these lessons is that we play it through and when you see me play at the beginning, that may not conformance accurate the tab so that everybody can be sure that we are literally on the same page, what happens in the end is that we’ll split the screen and you’ll see both hands very close up that way. And I’ll play it real slow and then I promise I’ll play exactly what's written on the page. Let's try with the split screen Further Along. [Demonstration]