Video One: Barre Chords and How to Use Them
Video Two: Bass Runs and How to Use Them
Video Three: Instant Fingerpicking Success
Video Four: Creating Folksong Arrangements

Happy Traum created these easy, enjoyable videos to help novice players learn essential guitar techniques, along with several songs to illustrate each subject. Great for beginning/intermediate guitarists who want to target specific areas for improvement.

Video One: Barre chords are a vitally important part of your ability to move beyond the third fret, play solid rhythm in all keys and get a wide variety of sounds through chord inversions. Happy de-mystifies these powerful chord shapes, providing tips on how to play them cleanly and easily. You'll learn basic chord theory, how to transpose from one key to another and how to play several chord progressions and songs, including Abilene and Stagolee.

Video Two: Bass runs help provide a smooth and musically interesting transition as you change chords. They're especially useful in country, bluegrass and folk songs, often providing a harmony line to the sung melody. Learning to add bass runs to your chord progressions teaches you how to play the notes of the scale in several keys, and helps you develop good timing and single-note accuracy. This tape teaches you a variety of bass "walks" in several keys, from the most basic to more complex chromatic runs. You'll learn to add solid accompaniment to several songs, including "Will The Circle Be Unbroken," "Bury Me Beneath The Willow," "I Am A Pilgrim," "Walk Right In" and more.

Video Three: The fingerpicking style is one of the most popular and engaging ways of playing the guitar. It's especially good for song accompaniment, and has been favored by folk, blues and country pickers, especially singer-songwriters such as James Taylor, Paul Simon, Shawn Colvin and Nanci Griffith. This lesson de-mystifies the right-hand technique by breaking it down into patterns that can be learned quickly and easily. Once these are mastered, a world of wonderful sounds will be available on the guitar, and you'll be able to apply them to some all-time favorite folk and traditional songs such as "Nine Hundred Miles," "Red Apple Juice," "Railroad Bill" and "Pretty Peggy-O."

Video Four: The beauty of the guitar is not necessarily based on advanced and highly technical playing skills. Interesting and unusual arrangements can be created with very simple ideas, as long as you have some knowledge and an elementary understanding of the guitar. On this video lesson, Happy takes some easy songs and shows you how to transform them into beautiful show pieces using interesting right-hand patterns, altered chords and chord substitutions, ornamentation, harmonized scales and other very basic but useful techniques. You'll be amazed at what you'll be able to do with the simplest folk songs.