Travis Picking
Named after the country singer, songwriter and guitarist who invented it, Merle Travis, Travis picking is a popular style of fingerpicking that is used in thousands of folk, country and finger-style guitar songs and arrangements.
how it works
The core premise of Travis picking is the alternating of a continuous bass grove using your picking hand thumb, with a melody pattern played using your fingers on the treble strings. The image below shows how this could work on an open C chord. Although there are exceptions generally with this style your thumb is used for the low E, A and D strings with your 1st finger playing the G string, middle finger the B string and ring finger the top E string:
example 1
This 1st example uses a simple progression of C | Am | G | D to get you started. Note how the root note changes string depending on which chord we play and how our melody pattern moves to the G, B and top E string when we play the D chord in the 4th bar.
This example also introduces another very common technique in Travis picking of plucking the root note and the first melody note at the same at the start of the pattern. We count this as 1 2& 3& 4& with the first note lasting twice as long as the others:
example 2
This 2nd example takes the same chord progression but adds another new concept often used in Travis picking where we alternate the root note and the 5th of the chord for our bass groove. We don't actually need to know too much chord theory to put this into practise as the 5th of a chord is always on the same fret as the root note but one string above it. We can't do this for the G as there is no string above the root note so for now we can just stay on the root note for this chord:
​
To try out your new travis picking skills look at "Dust in the Wind" by Kansas which can be found here.