How to Fingerpick "Salty Dog" on the Guitar

Video Transcript

"So, you can also walk down several notes within a progression. So, for example, if you're on an E, let me start that one over. Cut, I'm going to start over, okay? Ready? Okay. So, there's another kind of walk down you can do, which is just adding even more notes to kind of give it, kind of a real sort of a honky-tonk sound, I guess, if you want to call it that. There's a kind of a famous progression in blues and bluegrass music that I call the "salty dog" progression. It's basically, E to A to D and then to G. But then, after the G, you have a full walk down like, back to the E. Right? And here, I'm actually playing an E7. So, if I was to strum it, it would be E or E7, as I've got here. E, A, D and then G and then walk the G down like that before you, you know, go into the next measure. So the way that the "salty dog" blues sounds, the way Mississippi John Hurt played it and it sounds really good on, in this style, is kind of. Now, when I do this walk down, I'm actually popping each of those notes with my thumb. Right? So for a second, I kind of depart from that little rigid one, two, one, two that our thumb is doing just to kind of hit those notes with a walk down, you know. So."