Townes Van Zandt – Highway Kind Guitar Lesson Info
Learn how to play Townes Van Zandt – Highway Kind note-for-note on guitar with our detailed step-by-step guitar lesson.
This lesson teaches Highway Kind by Townes Van Zandt as a Travis-picked acoustic guitar accompaniment, following the beautifully understated guitar part that sits at the heart of the recording.The song uses a steady Travis picking pattern, but like many of Townes’ best accompaniments, it includes some of his characteristic little quirks and variations that stop it from feeling mechanical or repetitive. These subtle touches give the part its relaxed, flowing quality and are an important part of capturing the feel of the original.
Technically, the arrangement is very approachable. There are no barre chords and no thumb-over chords, and one of the great things about the song is its simplicity of structure. All four verses are played in essentially the same way, so once you’ve learned the intro and one verse, you already know virtually the entire song. In that sense, you get a lot of music for a relatively modest amount of work.
That makes Highway Kind an excellent introduction to Townes Van Zandt’s fingerpicking style and a rewarding piece for anyone looking to develop their Travis picking while learning a genuinely beautiful song.
The lesson walks through the arrangement step by step, and the download includes the full video lesson, a play-through performance, and detailed tab and chords so you can learn the song exactly as demonstrated.
- Difficulty level: Intermediate but fairly easy if you’re familiar with Townes’ fingerpicking style.
- Barre chords: No
- Thumb over chords: No
- Playing Style: Fingerpicked
- Tuning: Standard
- Separate Solo: No
- Separate Bass Part: No
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Townes Van Zandt – Highway Kind Download Details
The complete lesson contains a lesson video and a performance-standard play-thru video. It also contains the guitar tabs as PDF files and a songsheet with the chords and the lyrics of the lesson (if applicable), also as PDF files.
The videos are MP4 format and will play on PC’s, Macs and most mobile devices.
You’ll receive an email with a Zip file containing a total of 4 files as follows:
- Part 1: Guitar Video Lesson
- Part 2: Performance-standard Playthru Video
- Part 3: Songsheet with tabs & lyrics
- Part 4: Guitar Tab
Total Download size: 173.8 Mb
You’ll need to extract the MP4 and PDF files from the Zip file/s to be able to use them and you’ll need software to do so. If you don’t have a Zip program on your PC you’ll need to install one to open the file. I use Peazip which you can get free, here.
If you want to download to an iPad or iPhone you’ll need an app to do so, please read here to know more about it.
Townes Van Zandt – Highway Kind Lesson Previews
Playthru & Intro
Tab Preview
Chords & Songsheet Preview
Return to Individual Songs page
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