Thanks for the tips everyone. BTW, can you take any TAB (fingerpicking) and use clawhammer technique? Say, TABS by Ken Middleton or Dominator?
I'm a clawhammer beginner. Anyone know why specific clawhammer notation cannot or is not incorporated into clawhammer TABS? Seems to me it would be a helpful addition to TABS. Mahalo
Check the ezfolk tabs - like I said, if you read the info on the site, pay attention to how he tabs out the introductory material. You'll notice the chord strums and thumb plucks tabbed - the chords are multiple notes stacked up on top of each other and they are always followed by a single note on the G string - that's the thumb pluck. The two are written as a pair of eighth notes joined by a bar, if you're familiar with regular notation. All of the level 1,2, and 3 tabs on the site have these elements, the 'full' clawhammer arrangement.
As you've noticed, this is unusual - you usually just get the melody and the chord changes. This sort of presentation is really for people who can already apply the technique. Once you get the hang of the clawhammer and get the tock-tick-a rhythm down, you'll find that's all you need. The decision of where to put the chord strums and thumb plucks is dictated by the melody and your personal preference, once you start to develop your own understanding of the style. I'm still a long way from doing this..... once I used Aaron Keim's tutorials to get the basics down, I used the beginners tab I linked to at ezfolk to learn the handful of songs he tabbed out fully there. Once I'd played these several tunes for a few months and got more comfortable with the rhythm, I started to intuitively apply the clawhammer thing to other tunes I knew and even started improvising my own songs.
I'm certainly no expert, but one thing I would suggest - don't try to play any tunes until you get the tock-tick-a rhythm down. Try it in different places on the fretboard and use different notes, but just practice the tock-tick-a over and over and over until it's smooth and you don't have to think about it. This took me weeks.... Once you get that down, try the beginners tunes at ezfolk. I used a metronome and went sloooooow, until I could play through the tunes with relative ease, then gradually picked up speed. There was a day, a couple of months into working on it, where it all just sort of snapped into place and it's been all downhill since.
You just have to stick with it. It's repetitious and a little mind numbing, but you have to develop the muscle memory to execute the rhythm without thinking about it.