Breathe
Published: Fri, 04/08/22
This month in the Fingerstyle Five membership, I find myself attempting the pedagogical equivalent of taking a breath and playing more simply. Over time, there's come to be a pretty substantial library of material inside the membership, and for every song, you could approach it from a variety of levels, from focusing on just the eight or twelve bars of the actual tune to learning a dozen or more ways to improvise through that same tune. But it seems I've overlooked addressing something so simple as to be almost invisible: just how much of this should you practice in a given week – and how should you practice it?
Ultimately, I think getting good at guitar is a matter of learning to teach yourself, and a big part of that is figuring out your own capacities and thresholds – how much can you absorb in a week, how often do you need to go back and review, what helps you apply what you've learned from one particular tune to the next one you tackle? Having stumbled into a relatively simple and reliable practice method of my own early on, one flexible enough to apply to any number of different genres and techniques, it's finally occurred to me to introduce that practice method into the membership itself. It's nothing complicated, just enough to put a framework around what you're working on and keep track of your progress from week to week.
More on that in an upcoming newletter and/or video. In the meantime, today's Youtube lesson is about playing eight-bar blues. Specifically, I'll discuss how to break down a fingerstyle tune into its bass line and melody, and how to start putting them back together. Along the way, we'll look at the musical DNA shared by a handful of classic songs including "Sitting On Top Of The World," "Come On In My Kitchen," "You Got To Move" and others. You can find the lesson at the link below:
How To Play An Eight Bar Blues
More soon,
David