Walk on the wild side

We slide the G chord to travis pick in the style of Walk On The Wild Side

Something beautiful happens when you slide an entire open chord up the neck. The open strings now have a different relationship with the fretted notes (because those are slid up the neck). This results in chords with lovely extensions (a fancy word for notes in your chord that aren't the main notes).

In this lesson, we are going to take the G chord and slide it up five frets to give us a type of C chord - a C9 chord.

We begin by just playing the G chord and then while holding down all the fingers, slide it up retaining the shape until the index finger is at the 8th fret.

This should sound quite nice to your ears. By doing this, we effectively have a G to C chord change.

Here we just do a strum first to get the hang of sliding that chord up. It will take a little control and getting used to. The wrist needs to say loose but firm. I have chosen a G to C song here - something in the style of Lou Reed's Walk On The Wild Side because it is after all a well-known song with a G to C change.

Now we take the same pattern and we apply a Travis Picking pattern to it. The first note is a pinch (with a melody note and bass note at the same time). The rest of the melody notes are in-between bass notes.

As always start with the bass notes and get those solid. From there add just the pinch with the bass notes and then add each individual in-between note to build it up!

This would typically be the intro to the song.

A classic device in creating fingerstyle arrangements is to play the bass and then choose a melody which follows the vocal line.

The chords change here into G Am C Am. The 'good news' is that there is no sliding here - these are all fretted regularly.

You might find that there are a lot of melody notes - and there are. The timing isn't hard so if you play it slowly you should be fine. You will notice a 5-4-6-4 bass pattern but you could simplify this into a 5-4-5-4 bass pattern if you wished.

This is the main refrain and i have used doublestops (two melody notes played at once here to give it a more full sound and to make it a bit livelier)

If you have never tried to slide chords on guitar, this is the ideal time.

We slide the G chord in this lesson, adapt that in the style of Walk on the Wild Side and add some Travis picking and create a fingerstyle arrangement that lays out the vocal line as one of the parts!

Take your time and play it slowly at first!

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