Blues Up The Neck!

Published: Tue, 03/08/22

A few birthdays ago, my friend Frank gave me a glass-scoring tool and a lesson in making homemade bottleneck slides. Towards the end of last Thursday's Fingerstyle Five live stream on "You Got To Move," we were talking about all the different versions of the tune, and since I'd based the melody of my arrangement on the Mississippi Fred McDowell version, I reached for one of those slides I'd made with Frank to show what I meant. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but minutes later, as I was reaching for my keyboard to end the stream, I managed to sweep said slide right off the desk. Gravity did its thing, the concrete floor did the rest, and it was time to get back into the slide-making business.

It's curious, really – over decades of playing and thinking about music, certain things can seem incredibly important at one time, yet manage to fade into the background for equally long spells. Slide is, for me, a case in point – I don't play much slide at all right now, or teach anything about it, really. But I was noticing during that live stream how certain styles of slide rely not on working your way across the strings in open position, but almost exclusively on taking a melody up and down the high string. A blues melody like "You Got To Move" – and its many cousins, from "Sitting On Top Of The World" and "Come On In My Kitchen" to "Things About Coming My Way" and "It Hurts Me Too" – is the perfect example of this approach, at least as performed by F. McDowell.

My antennae are up right now for that sort of thing because this coming weekend I'm offering a revised and updated version of one of my most popular workshops, Blues Up The Neck! If you've ever eyeballed that zone above the fifth fret and wondered what the atmosphere is like up there, this two-hour workshop can provide you with the tools to navigate your way up into that rarefied territory and, more importantly, make it safely back down to open position with your groove and your wits intact.

To learn more about the workshop and sign up, just click the link below:

Blues Up The Neck! 2.0

More soon,

David

P.S. Can't attend live this Saturday? Not a problem – everyone who registers will also have 12 months of streaming access to a replay of the entire workshop.