In this guitar lesson, we’re going to work on country & bluegrass flatpicking in the style of Doc Watson. First, I’ll teach you how to play some catchy guitar riffs similar to what you’ll hear in Doc’s arrangement of “Tennessee Stud”. Next, I’ll break down a few Doc Watson style strumming patterns and we’ll take a look at some chord progressions that you can use for practice. After you learn the guitar riffs and strumming patterns, practice your Doc Watson style flatpicking over “Tennessee Stud”. Doc plays this song at a pretty fast pace so I’d recommend you begin practicing at a comfortable pace and then slowly increase your speed in increments. Overall, this is a great guitar lesson for developing accurate pick control.
Practice with Doc Watson
Practice this lesson’s strumming patterns and riffs over Doc Watson’s arrangement of “Tennessee Stud” using the embedded player from Spotify. We’d highly recommend using Spotify for online radio. If you don’t have a Spotify account, click here to sign up free with your Facebook account or with an e-mail address.
Good one Devin, thanks!
New lesson! We’ve been getting a lot of requests for a “Tennessee Stud” style guitar lesson so I hope y’all like this one. Great song with a lot of good Doc style riffs and strumming. I’ll be recording plenty of new lessons over the next few months so keep sending in your requests…lesson request page can be found at the top menu under the “Contact” link.
Nice lesson! I’ve always loved the Doc Watson sound. There’s something about the way he played that’s hard to duplicate — kind of choppy but clean at the same time. Can’t wait to work on this. By the way, your playthrough with tablature videos are always very helpful. Great work.
A great lesson Devin
That is a BIG lesson Devin with a lot of thought and care gone into it. Looking forward to trying to master this as I love Doc Watson’s songs. A big thank you.,
Thank you very much Devin for such a thorough lesson, very complete and interesting.
My thanks especially since I’m one of those who dropped the request.
Your lessons are better and better,
greetings,
Jack.
Excellent lesson
nice one
just getting better and better.
all coming together
thanks Devin
Well I can play this as fast as doc all be it not as fancy, but getting the words out as fast is so difficult.
He’s obviously known for his amazing guitar playing, but I think as a vocalist he was brilliant.
My favourite of all time.
There’s a great duet with Dolly Pardon performing “last thing on my mind” which is stunning, especially Dolly’s harmony, again the best.
Thanks for the lesson, I’m gonna keep practising vocal before attempting it live at a jam.
You’re too fast for me in strumming pattern 3…but I’ll work on it..
Good exercices structures, clear teaching thanks Devin by the way I found a resemblance to Neil Young song tell me why the way is playing with the C chord…I tried to send you the sheet song but the system doens’t accept the jpeg….
Great lesson. The sliding the tab left to see how the measures tie together was really helpful on keeping the syncopation right.
I really enjoy learning to play Doc Watson songs. Thanks for putting these together and hopefully more to come.
This is an awesome lesson.
Picked this as my first song lesson to learn here. Love stuff by Doc Watson, how could I not. On measures 5-8 now. 1-4 took me a solid week. New to guitar, maybe 9 months. Finding the lessons here easy enough to understand. Still working on the skills to convert them into reality.