REQ: Truefire - Roberto Dalla Vecchia's Solo Flatpicking Handbook

Popularized by players like Doc Watson, Norman Blake and Tony Rice, flatpicking was developed by guitarists arranging old-time American fiddle tunes on the guitar, expanding the instrument's traditional rhythmic role by adding melodies and occasional bass runs on the lower strings.

One of Italy’s top recording artists, composers and educators, Roberto Dalla Vecchia designed this Solo Flatpicking Handbook of essential concepts, techniques and creative approaches to take your flatpicking chops to the next level and help you develop a flatpicking repertoire designed specifically for solo performance.

We’re very proud to welcome Roberto to the family with his first TrueFire course! ”Generally, flatpicking guitar is associated with American traditional music where other players accompany you as you play your solos or vice versa. Having both classical and fingerstyle backgrounds, I found myself flatpicking guitar tunes all by myself; maybe because it was hard to find someone to play this type of music where I live in Italy! This is exactly what we'll be doing in this course: flatpicking guitar as a soloist. That means that even if we only play one note at a time, we want to have a rich sound, carefully mixing the melody notes with chords and basses.”

Roberto organized the course into two sections. In the first section, you’ll work through 12 essential concepts and techniques designed to deliver everything you need to start building your solo flatpicking repertoire: Let It Ring, Carter Style, Rest Strokes, Bass On The Offbeat, Melody On The Offbeat, Cross-picking, Floating, Swing Feel, Free Time & Tempo, The Picking Hand, Common Chords & The Capo , and Simple Embellishments.

In the second section, you’ll apply everything you learned in the first section and play your way through 8 flatpicking Performance Studies, composed of both traditional and original compositions, all arranged for solo performance: One More Time, Bill Cheatham, The Storms Are On The Ocean, Aura Lee, Gift Of A Lifetime, Red Haired Boy, Eight More Miles To Louisville, and Ticket To Cesuna.

”We’ll start out with “One More Time” an original in the key of A that’s also an excellent workout for your picking hand. Next we’ll play “Bill Cheatham”, a traditional fiddle piece where we’ll use a capo to move open position chords to the key of A. The Storms Are On The Ocean is a medium tempo waltz where we’ll put our Carter Style approach to use. We’ll use rest strokes and syncopation in the melody of Aura Lee, a progression made popular by Elvis Presley’s Love Me Tender.

Gift of a Lifetime” is an original song in free time that uses a lot of dynamics to convey emotion. Another traditional fiddle tune, Red Haired Boy makes use of the floating technique to create cascading melodic runs. Moving to drop-d tuning, Eight More Miles To Louisville combines cross-picking and simple embellishments in a traditional tune. And finally, we’ll work on “Ticket To Cesuna”, another original that utilizes a simple open tuning and puts all our flatpicking concepts to work.”

All of the Performance Studies are tabbed and notated for your practice, reference and study purposes. You’ll also get Guitar Pro files so that you can play, loop and/or slow down the tab and notation as you work through the lessons.

Grab your guitar and let’s go solo with our flatpicking and Roberto Dalla Vecchia!