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December 2009 Free Flatpicking Lesson
from
Flatpicking Guitar Magazine

"East Tennessee Blues"
Arranged by Dan Miller and Tim May
In this month’s newsletter we are giving our regular newsletter contributor, Mickey Abraham, a break and providing you with some material from Volumes 5 and 6 of the Flatpicking Essentials course. For those of you who already have those volumes of the course, don’t worry, we’ve thrown in something a little extra that doesn’t appear in the course.

In this month’s newsletter lesson we are providing beginner, intermediate, and advanced arrangements of the fiddle tune “East Tennessee Blues.” The beginning arrangement, by Dan Miller, does not appear in the Flatpicking Essentials course. So, for those of you who are studying the course (as well as those of you who are not) this beginner’s arrangement will provide a good opportunity for you to learn a simple arrangement of the tune before trying to tackle the intermediate and advanced versions.

In arranging the beginners version, I listened to a recording of Bill Monroe playing the tune. I did not transcribe Monroe’s arrangement, I simply listened to what he was doing, hummed along to get a general feel for the basic melody, then I came up with my arrangement. In Volume 3 of the Flatpicking Essentials course I teach how to arrange simple versions of fiddle tunes using this method.

The “intermediate” level arrangement is taken from Flatpicking Essentials Volume 5. In this volume the idea was for Tim May to improvise tunes in the style of various famous flatpickers. Again, the tunes in this book are not exact transcriptions. Tim improvised the arrangements and during each section of the tune he played in the style of a different flatpicker. For instance, in his improvisation of “East Tennessee Blues” for Volume 5 he played the opening A section in the style of Doc Watson, then he played the B section in the style of Pat Flynn, then he played another A section in the style of Mark O’Connor. Other flatpickers’ styles who are presented and studied in this volume include Tony Rice, Norman Blake, Clarence White, and Dan Crary.

The “advanced” arrangement of “East Tennessee Blues” that appears in this lesson comes from Flatpicking Essentials, Volume 6. In this volume Tim May improvised about 18 different fiddle tunes and bluegrass songs, playing each two times through. For each song he focused on various and different advanced flatpicking techniques. For this particular song he presented the use of syncopation, the use of the “flat 9” arpeggio, and the use of quarter note triplets.

If you’d like to find out more about each volume of the Flatpicking Essentials course, please go to www.flatpickingmercantile.com.

We hope you enjoy these arrangements of “East Tennessee Blues.”


East Tennessee

East Tennessee

East Tennessee

East Tennessee

East Tennessee

East Tennessee

East Tennessee

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