Guitar Discovery

I've been fingerpicking (aka "Travis picking") for so long that I can't even remember how to strum. Typically, there's a pattern of eighth notes that you pick with your thumb and three fingers. Most of the time, it's one note at a time, with occasional exceptions where the thumb and one of the fingers play at once, in a "pinch" motion. This makes an intricate, pretty, refined, musical stream -- think of "Scarborough Fair", "The Boxer", or (my latest song/obsession) "Dear Prudence".

James Taylor also fingerpicks nearly everything he plays, including "Country Road". I've been trying to work that one up for a while, but I couldn't get it to sound right -- "big" enough -- unless I went to some kind of hybrid thumb-picking but fingers-strumming, right-hand method. It's big enough that way, but it's not the way he's doing it, and leaves the finesse behind.

Yesterday, I was poking at it again, and somehow started fingerpicking it, but I was (accidentally?) using two fingers at a time, inside the pattern. Eureka! My "training" has disallowed picking more than one finger at a time, so I've never done it. It'd be like signing your name with the pen held between the wrong two fingers -- you *could* do it, but you never *would*.

But, bam, it sounds a lot more like what James is doing, and solves that mystery. I feel like an idiot that I never thought of/discovered it before.

"We'll be saying a big hello to all intelligent life forms everywhere... and to everyone else out there, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys."