Wilderness Jack's Scavenger Scare

Published: Mon, 01/31/22

After hosting yesterday's live stream tour of the Fingerstyle Five membership, I ankled back round to the studio last night to help the Dauphin with his biology assignment, a mock podcast on "Scavengers 101." I learned a lot, not least of which is that while No. 1 Son is not especially (or at all) interested in pursuing the family business, he is by way of being something of a one-take wonder when it comes to loosely improvised voiceover. So we motored through, Dauphin winging it into the mic and self doing the engineering and editing. I got the gig for three reasons: one, proximity; two, I own a couple of nice microphones, and three, my kid is still at an age where he assumes it would be a piece of cake for me to create a goofy 10-second theme song at least as good as the ones that frame his favorite game-nerd episodes.

One of the great joys of having assembled the various and disparate skills necessary to score fast food commercials is finding opportunities to donate those skills to causes closer to home. Also, getting to dust off the analog synth I accumulated three years ago and had yet to find any real purpose for beyond padding my tax return's expenses column (A Korg Minilogue, for the detail-minded). But most of all, it was a reminder of how going deep and learning one specific thing can ripple out over time to inform all kinds of other pursuits, some of which you have no way of anticipating.

I found myself mentioning this in yesterday afternoon's live stream, the guided tour of the Fingerstyle Five membership. I designed the membership with a specific kind of student in mind: fingerstyle guitarists looking to build a repertoire of solo blues instrumentals. Very specific! But of course, having created the tools to work methodically towards that goal and put them into the hands of membership students, I have had the pleasure of being constantly surprised by how people are putting those tools to use. There's one student who posts videos of himself playing cranked versions of the tunes along with his own drum programming. Another member took a blues with a walking bass and used his guitar synth to turn it into a piece for horns and upright. And then of course, there are many students who are down with singing the tunes and use the instrumental instruction to round out their vocal arrangements, or who plan on applying what they're learning to playing, at least sometimes, with other musicians.

Since the membership's emphasis is on specific musical skills – groove, improvisation, arranging – the things you learn in the Fingerstyle Five apply to more than playing fingerstyle blues. When you memorize note-for-note versions of classic prewar tunes, you do learn many valuable lessons and develop valuable skills, but you're ultimately left with a series of specific pieces meant to played a specific way. When you learn step-by-step processes for developing your picking coordination, building phrase-by-phrase solos and creating complete song arrangements, you can apply them to any tunes you like, blues or otherwise, develop solos in any variety of genres and turn your own songs into compelling, well-thought-out statements.

If you've enjoyed the lessons from the past few days and like the idea of honing specific skills that will allow you play with more confidence, clarity and creativity, registration for the Fingerstyle Five is now open. Go to link below to learn more and sign up:

Join The Membership

More soon,

David

P.S. if you'd like to catch a replay of yesterday's Tour of the Membership, or any of the previous live streams from last week, you can find them here:

A Tour Of The Membership