Man, it is a beautiful day today.

Hey, guys. Claude Johnson here and I am very,
very excited about our new DVD course called
“Acoustic Guitar Toolkit”. It comes from
Sol Philcox who is one of the hottest players
in the national scene today. He’s the same guy
that toured with Grammy winner Jake Owen.
Brent Mason called him the best player on the
planet under the age of 25, and he’s the same
British guitar prodigy that brought us the
“Ultimate Blues Master Class” and
“Wicked Chicken Pickin Chops”.

So this new course, “Acoustic Guitar Toolkit”,
think of it as like a treasure chest of
plug-and-play licks you can use any time you
want and they’re the same riffs and licks that
Sol user on the national scene when he really
needs to sound good.

Here’s the deal, I’m going to give you this
course, three DVDs with tabs for free. Here’s
the catch, you pick up the other two courses,
“Ultimate Blues Master Class” and
“Wicked Chicken Pickin Chops” and I’ll include
this free. So it’s basically buy two, get one
free. But I’m not even going to charge you full
price. In fact, just $97 gets you all three courses.
That’s nine DVDs with tabs. It’s a great deal.
You can also just buy “Acoustic Guitar Toolkit”
alone if you want.

All right, now to sweeten the deal even further,
I’ve got three really sweet electric guitars from
Spear. Spear is a new Korean guitar company.
They’ve got some really hot stuff. I know this is
an acoustic product, but you can actually use these
riffs and licks on electric for rhythm parts. And
anyone who buys in the next 24 hours, I’m going to
select three random winners and hook you guys up
with these guitars. So let’s check it out.

All right, guys, first up we’ve got the Spear
Gladius HT Scratched Iron. Check it out.
Very cool. It’s got EMG pickups and a five-way
pickup selector with coil tap. Sounds great.

Next up, we’ve got the Spear RDT, beautiful guitar.
It’s got a licensed Floyd Rose tremolo, locking
tuners, Blackout pickups, five-way selector with
coil tap and it is the bomb.

Last but not least, we have the Spear RD250,
another beautiful guitar. This one is white
with gold hardware and I think it sounds pretty good.

All right, guys, so once again, it’s free when
you buy the other two courses, “Acoustic Guitar Toolkit”
or you can buy it by itself. Two really hot deals and
we don’t usually do this, but I want to hook you guys
up with something special today. And I would go ahead
and get it right now so you’re eligible for these Spear guitars.

Stay tuned, lots of awesome stuff coming your way in
the upcoming days, weeks and months. So thanks for
sticking with me. I hope you guys have an awesome day
and I will catch you later. Stay loose.

Country thumb picking technique, it’s kind of like a
Merle Travis, Chet Atkins thing. This isn’t really like
an accurate recreation of their styles because they really
had, Chet especially, had a really unique and delicate and
beautiful playing style that I can’t really recreate that.
But I can take elements from that and the basic principles
to show you a few exercises that should be pretty easy to
learn. This is the kind of thing I’m talking about.

So let’s have a look at this E. You’ll notice I’m doing this
alternating root to 5th thing. I’m going… That’s kind of
like the Chet Atkins way to do it. He always alternated,
whereas Merle Travis usually always just kind of kept it
just between the root and the 5th. I tend to combine the two.

This is the position you want to take. It’s a good idea to
kind of anchor your palm a little bit close to the bridge.
We were talking about that earlier. It’s nice to get a good…
We want to do the same deal where we’re muting the lower
strings and leaving the high ones open so the leads will
come out on top of the rhythm. So we’ve got this little
move of popping the low E and we’re popping the high E,
second fret, D string, third finger and we’re hammering-on
at the same time we’re picking the open G string. You’ve
got to hammer-on with the first finger.

Now this is where it gets a little tricky because we’re
going to still keep this… And so on and so forth. But
I’m going to break it down super slow again and you can
see what’s happening. That’s our pattern.

We’re going from the B note, which our 5th in the E chord,
the second fret, A string. So that’s them joined together.
Super slowly again.

So just the same as how we took the initial, the little,
simple pentatonic phrasing and we turned it into a major
by doing this little…

We can use similar notes to get phrasing on the low E
string as well, and it gives it more of like a major
country type feel. We can’t do the same riff because
it’s going — it’s descending. It’s going from a high E
down to the lower B. We don’t have a note lower than the
B on the lower end of the guitar. So we’ve got our…
We can just use a little country type thing. That’s kind
of like… It’s not quite the same as that, because if
you were to copy that I’m sure it would be pretty hard
to play on the low end of it because you’re jumping
around octaves. This is just a little — a really
short phrase.

So just starting off exactly the same as we did our three
to four. We’re going… Three to four. Then you want to
pick the B note on the 2nd fret of the A string and we’re
just going to go 2-4-2 or just 2-4, even. So it’s like a
pick up, like a one, two, three, four.

Then the only other notes we’ve got is just an open E and
an octave E. So open and then second fret D. Watch where
my finger is on the position. I’ve kind of moved away from
this pentatonic thing and I’m kind of in this — it’s almost
like a F sharp kind of range, but it’s not. You’ll see where
it goes when I continue it on. So we’ve got this.

Let’s join the low one together with the high one just for
the sake of doing it.

So that gives it like a real country feel, but when you play
it in context of like a more bluesy type thing — like check this out.

Yes, I know the background is out of focus — that’s just the “intro” footage, its supposed to be like that

(I’ll be posting sample lessons soon)

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