Lester Flatt style instruction on YouTube

Chris SharpChris Sharp may be best known for his work on the Grammy Award winning O Brother, Where Art Thou? soundtrack, or his years spent touring with the late John Hartford. What you may not know is that this accomplished guitar player is also a dedicated instructor.

Sharp is making it easy to take advantage of his interest in teaching guitar. He recently uploaded close to a dozen instructional video clips to YouTube. The video segments are each 10 minutes or less in length, respecting Youtube’s 10 minute length limit per video.

Addressing the rhythm style of Lester Flatt, he covers everything from tuning, to chord shapes, the thumbpick-fingerpick pattern inherent to Flatt’s style, and more. The most recent video, number 8 in the Lester Flatt series, tackles the E Chord and Flatt’s rhythm pattern for the tune Six White Horses. It’s a little out of the order he had planned to present the material in.

After getting several emails specifically asking about this pattern I bumped it up in the original outline for how these videos would proceed. The “Six White Horses” pattern is one of Lester’s staple patterns and I believe this is very close to what he was playing and hope this video will be of assistance of any who wish to learn it.

Shot with an HD camera, the videos are well done with studio quality audio. If you have the bandwidth, I’d suggest you click the “watch in HD” link under the video. Doing so will present you with a large and very nicely encoded High Definition version of the video. My Verizon DSL played them back flawlessly without hesitation.

If you enjoy the videos, be sure to visit Chris’ website and purchase a CD or t-shirt to help support his efforts to provide this kind of instruction for free.

Here’s the Six White Horses clip.